Local-community team Turbo Charged 14615 shines at the FIRST Illinois FTC State Competition at Elgin Community College on March 12, 2022.

OSWEGO, IL, USA, March 22, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Team Turbo Charged finished the day of 2v2 robot competition and judge-selected awards as Illinois state champions; Inspire Award Winner for overall excellence and role model of innovation, design, programming, community outreach and the engineering-design process; and Promote Award winner for outstanding team promotional video. Turbo Charged member Preeta Swaminathan also won a spot as a dean’s list finalist.

These combined wins advanced them to the 2022 FIRST (For Inspiration, Recognition, Science and Technology) World Championship in Houston in April, placing the team in the top 1% of all First Tech Challenge (FTC) teams worldwide.

Turbo Charged is a community FIRST FTC team comprising five students from four schools in two local school districts, Oswego SD 308 and Naperville SD 204: Ryan Oberfranc, Oswego High School; Jensen Coonradt, Oswego East High School; Preeta Swaminathan and Pranav Swaminathan, Metea Valley High School; and Allen Xu, Scullen Middle School.

These students meet three days a week for more than 10 total hours, including evenings and weekends. Guided by their mentors, they collaborate on forming the ideas, design concept, CAD, prototype, build-out and programming of a fully working robot to complete the season’s competition objectives in just eight weeks.

The team brings their robot to three local competitive meets, where they can learn from design mistakes, revise their design and fine-tune a reliable robot that can withstand the wear and tear of competition. Different teams then contend at a qualifier event for the state level. If they qualify, they compete at another state event for one of three spots that will advance from Illinois to the world competition.

In addition to building the robot, Turbo Charged serves as a leading ambassador of FIRST and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) as well as for their communities.

Turbo Charged further extends its outreach by volunteering at local events, packing food for Feed My Starving Children, sitting on the board for a local humane society, cleaning ponds in their community and inspiring other students to get active in FIRST and excited about STEM programs.

Turbo Charged is thankful to the sponsors who support the team and the FIRST program: HQC Inc., Caterpillar, TE Connectivity and Bayer Foundation.

To learn more about all FIRST programs, visit www.firstinspires.org

Deanna Oberfranc
Navigate Robotics NFP
+1 630-642-7078
email us here

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