M’Aiken Magic, the Aiken high school robotics team, recently traveled to Houston, Texas, to compete in the FIRST robotics world championship.
FIRST robotics is an educational program that is offered to students between eighth through 12th grade.
These students work on building a robot from scratch for an annual challenge presented by FIRST and develop new STEM skills in the process. The FIRST mission is to “inspire young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators.”
After winning their district qualifiers in Anderson and Hartsville earlier this year, M’Aiken Magic went onto finish in second place out of the 50 best teams from both Georgia and South Carolina at the Peachtree district championship. This qualified them to attend the world championship in Houston where they competed against over 600 other robotics teams for a chance to be the world champions. The championship is divided into eight divisions of around 70 teams each. After each division plays two days of three-on-three style qualification matches, teams are seeded based on their performance. The top eight seeds select their alliance partners to play in the divisional tournament.
M’Aiken Magic already knew it was going to be an uphill battle when they discovered that their division not only included two of the reigning world champion teams, but also the No. 1 ranked robot in the world from this season. But M’Aiken Magic has never been a team to shy away from a challenge. After the second day of qualification matches, they ended up seeding ninth out of the 77 teams in their division.
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