DECATUR, Ill. — The FIRST Tech Challenge robotics season has been going strong, and Super SCREAM Bros will once again represent Macon County 4-H at the Illinois FTC Championship tournament scheduled for Feb. 24 and 25 in Elgin, Illinois.

Super SCREAM Bros competed at the Central-Southern Qualifier in February and received second place INSPIRE award, which allowed the team to advance to the state tournament. The team also received the THINK award, a judged award recognizing the team who best documents the team’s engineering design journey in the engineering portfolio.

“During our season, we have worked on programming with our odometry and roadrunner integration,” says team member Elizabeth. “Our robot design focuses on a center grab mechanism and keeping a low center of mass.”

Super SCREAM Bros are just as impressive off the field as they are on the field. The team demonstrated its commitment to sharing STEM and the message of FIRST by sending STEM robot kits to Kenya, in addition to other outreach efforts such as teaching robotics in the classroom and providing demonstrations to community groups and organizations.

Super SCREAM Bros FIRST Tech Challenge team currently has twelve members and is coached by three volunteers.

FIRST Tech Challenge students learn to think like engineers. Teams design, build, and program robots to compete in an alliance format against other teams. Robots are built from a reusable platform, powered by Android technology, and can be coded using a variety of levels of
Java-based programming.

ABOUT 4-H: Illinois 4-H empowers and prepares Illinois youth for success. University of Illinois Extension provides 4-H programs in every county in Illinois, affecting the lives of 200,000 youth each year through sustained learning clubs, groups, and short-term programming.