This weekend, two St. Vrain Valley Schools based teams from Up-A-Creek Robotics competed at the World Championship in Houston, Texas, both winning the world championship in their respective competitions in front of an audience of 30,000 attendees at the George R. Brown Convention Center.
Up-A-Creek Robotics participates in three competition types. The FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC) tasks students with building a 120 lb., 5 ft. tall robot that competes on a basketball court-sized field. The FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) team tasks students with building an 18 in. robot that competes on a 12 ft. x 12 ft. field. The FIRST LEGO League (FLL), is designed for students in grades 4-8 and they compete with handheld size robots on a tabletop field.
Both the FRC and FTC teams won the World Championship in Houston, Texas. It was the first win for both teams and the first time a Colorado team has won the FRC competition. Up-A-Creek’s FRC team, #11260, consisted of of 75 high school students across the district. Up-A-Creeks’s FTC team, #11260, consisted of 14 students spanning grades 7-12. The FRC team had an alliance with a team based out of Silicon Valley, CA. The FTC team had an alliance with a team based out of Romania.
Up-A-Creek Robotics started with a dozen students at Silver Creek High School in 2005 and has expanded to 150 students, with eight teams representing seven high schools across St. Vrain Valley Schools, 25 adult mentors, and their own facility and machine shop. “In 2015, we got pretty serious about having a robotics pathway, ” said Teresa Ewing, Computer Science Teacher at Niwot High School. “This is proof that the philosophy of starting students early in STEM bears fruit.”