Robotics Competition For High Schoolers Kicks Off At LIU Brooklyn Campus

DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN, BROOKLYN — Long Island University is kicking off its 12-week robotics competition on Saturday, Jan. 7 on its Brooklyn campus, the first day of an exciting phase for hundreds of local high school students. The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robots Competition gives kids a chance to build a team, design that team's brand and learn collaboration skills through building and programming robots to perform tasks against their competitors. It's a budding engineer's dream.

The competition has already lured 2,850 global teams and more than 71,000 high school students to participate since it began last year.

The competition takes place in the Kumble Theatre in the Humanities Building on the Brooklyn campus in Fort Greene from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Kumble Theater is located on University Plaza between DeKalb Avenue and Willoughby Street.

Doors open at 9:30 a.m., opening remarks by Dean Richard Sunday are at 10 a.m., the Keynote Presentation is at 10:15 a.m., and then comes the distribution of parts like batteries and automation components that the kids will need.

Teams have six weeks to build and design their robots with no instructions, and each team has a volunteer professional engineer to work with the kids. Finalists will have a chance to win from $19 million in college scholarships.

Lead photo via FIRST