From Tuesday, April 24, through the early morning hours of Sunday, April 29, twenty-six members of the Whitewater High School Robotics Team Ferradermis and seven adult mentors traveled to Detroit for the FIRST Championships. While there, the team competed with and against 405 teams from around the world including France, Poland, Chinese Taipei, the Netherlands, and Canada as part of the high school level FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). The Cobo Center in Detroit simultaneously played host to the middle school FIRST Tech Challenge Championships and the elementary school FIRST Lego League and Lego League Junior Championships.

Altogether, the four events hosted more than 15,000 students from 700 teams and 37 countries. Ferradermis had one practice match and ten qualification matches on Tesla, one of the six competition fields for FRC, with randomly assigned alliances of three robots, finishing with a qualification record of 4-6 and ranked 48th out of 67 teams in the Tesla division. One of the highlights of the qualification matches was playing with the number one overall team in Tesla and helping set a high score for the event.

Ferradermis would like to thank the dozens of businesses, organizations, and community members who came forward to help the team in its fundraising efforts which made the trip possible.

Photos from the event: