FIRST Team 1764: Liberty Robotics had an amazing season last year, winning the prestigious Chairman’s Award at the Greater Kansas City Regional, an event hosted by FIRST.

   “FIRST (For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics is an organization, founded by Dean Kamen and its focus is on encouraging science, technology, engineering and math among high school students and instilling in them values of gracious professionalism, sportsmanship, and ‘coopertition’- that is cooperating with your opponents and competing fairly and in a respectful non-confrontational manner,” senior Ben Ross said.

   Winning the Chairman’s Award allowed Team 1764 to qualify to compete in the World Championship for FIRST, but the team does much more than just build robots during their Build Season for competition. They have events in preseason and postseason.

   “In the community, we do a multitude of things. We attend science nights at elementary schools to get kids interested in things, like science and math. We’re in the Fall Festival parade and we have a booth. We work with Gary Crossley Ford to put on Drive One and for every test drive they do on that date, they make a donation and during that time we host a robot faire for younger children, where we make different, little brush bots, which is just a little robot made with the tip of a toothbrush,” Sophomore Erin Ellington said.

   The Robotics Team is hosting its Drive One event and Robot Faire on September 17th.

   “I would recommend it to basically anyone who likes either science or technology, or wants to get involved in that kind of stuff. There’s so many different people that you see here, people who are good at coding, building stuff, and then you have your people who are good at business and it really just overall anybody can do it really,” Junior Jacob King said.