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Local School Team Wins Texas A&M BEST Robotics Contest

HEATH, TEXAS, November 12, 2010 — The Fulton School’s robotics team is proud to announce that it brought home the 2010 Texas A&M Commerce Lion’s Pride BEST Trophy for scoring the most points during competition on October 30 in Commerce, TX. This is the second year for the Fulton upper school BEST (Boosting Engineering Science and Technology) robotics program and the first for the middle and upper school SeaPerch ROV robotics program.

Twelve Fulton high school students participated in all facets of the BEST robotic build over a period of six weeks. In the BEST program, all 700 participating schools receive the same supplies to design a robot for a specific task and compete against other schools in their hub to see whose robot design is the most successful in performing the tasks. This year’s tasks were to move gadgets and gizmos from an assembly line to a sorting area in a given amount of time and to determine which items were defective. Team members were also required to compile an engineering process notebook, design a team tee-shirt, create a marketing presentation, be interviewed about their robot program, and set up a display table at the competition site. The Fulton students handled all with poise and confidence.

The 2010 Fulton robotics team’s president is senior Tyler Johnson, and junior Tim Borgen serves as the vice president. Both officers were members of last year’s inaugural robotics team. Other team members are seniors Kendall Johnson and Brett Steffen, and underclassmen Quinn Ellison, Eric Palmerduca, Harrison Cleek, Abby Wilson, LuLu Wilson, Hayden Leverett, Danielle Cohen, and Jada Codwell. The team’s engineering mentor is Tony Schneemann of Heath and the Fulton faculty sponsor/coach is Cheryl Farrens.

The robotics’ team next meet will be at the Texas BEST regional competition at the University of North Texas in Denton on November 19 and 20.