Walton Robotics Team 'Among the Giants'

Chris Harris of the Walton High School Robotics team just joined the squad last year.

Now he's part of the Raiders' contingent at the FIRST science and technology student competition that began in St. Louis on Thursday. 

“None of us expected to be here among the giants,” he said at Thursday's competition. “I’ve been taking programming classes for three years and joined the team because I thought coding for a robot would be a good way to gain experience and knowledge.”

They are among the more than 11,000 students from 29 countries competing at the Edward Jones Dome.

FIRST is sponsored by a non-profit organization called For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST). Under strict rules and limited time and resources, teams build and program robots to perform tasks against competitors in a series of robotic games.

The competition has four divisions – Archimedes, Curie, Galileo and Newton – all named in honor of history’s greatest scientists and mathematicians. Teams in each division compete against each other in several qualifying matches. 

The winning teams then proceed to the final division called Einstein, which is the championship game. Qualifying matches for all teams will continue through Saturday morning. The championship matches begin at 4 p.m. on Saturday.

In addition to the robotics competition, the FIRST Championship event also includes the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) for high school students, which features smaller robots. The other two groups in the championship include the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) for elementary and middle-school students and the Junior FIRST LEGO League (Jr.FLL) for 6- to 9-year-olds.