Teams of students from the Bennington, Manchester and Hoosick, N.Y. areas recently competed with more than two dozen other teams in this year’s Vermont FIRST Tech Challenge Championship, a competition that involves designing, building and programming robots to tackle scorable objectives.
The state championship, held electronically on March 13, marked the culmination of a season that began last September, when the year’s design challenge was unveiled and teams began meeting to conceptualize their robots, which in competition are tasked with carrying out tasks both autonomously and with operator assistance. Teams consist of up to 10 students in 7th through 12th grade.
One of the three local teams, the Manchester Machine Makers, which formed in 2019, won one of the competition’s seven judged awards, the Think Award, which “primarily focuses on the team’s…