Westchester County Middle School Students Win Award in International Robotics Competition
Hotshot Hotwires, a team of seven middle school students from Westchester County, recently participated in FIRST® World Festival, an international robotics and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) competition, where they won the second place award in programming. The competition was held in St. Louis, MO on April 26-29. The Hotshot Hotwires team is comprised of Aadi Bhattacharya and Deepta Gupta from Valhalla Middle School, Ayushmaan Aggarwal and Elina Rani from Lakeland Copper Beech Middle School, Niharika Bhattacharjee and Raka Bose from Mildred E. Strang Middle School and Renuka Muralidhar from Mahopac Middle School.
After three rounds of competition with over a hundred teams in the Hudson Valley region, the Hotshot Hotwires won the 2016-17 Hudson Valley FIRST® LEGO® League (HVFLL) Championship at the regional final tournament hosted by Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie on February 25. This earned them a spot in the FIRST® World Festival in St. Louis, where they represented New York along with five other regional champions from the state. At the World Festival, they competed with 108 top teams from over 40 countries.
FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a not-for-profit organization founded by renowned inventor Dean Kamen to spark young people’s interest in science, engineering and mathematics. More information about FIRST® can be found at https://www.firstinspires.org/. One of FIRST®’s four signature programs is FIRST® LEGO® League or FLL, in which 9 to 14 year old students research a real world engineering challenge, develop a solution, and build and program a robot using LEGO parts and software. They are expected to work and compete while practicing a set of core values centered around gracious professionalism and friendly competition with emphasis on respect and cooperation. The website https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/fll has more information about FLL.
For the group’s research project, the Hotshot Hotwires studied the problem of thousands of pet dogs suffering from heat injuries, and often death, when left in parked cars that get too hot in the sun. The team devised a two-part solution consisting of an alert system and a mitigation system. Team members consulted experts from IBM, Yazaki Motors, McKinsey and Co., the SPCA and Binghamton University while developing their innovative solution. The team members, including Raka and Niha, are coinventors in a patent disclosure related to their solution, which is currently being processed by IBM Research. Subject Matter Experts at IBM Research have rated this patent disclosure as worthy of further processing to fulfill the requirements for filing it with the US Patent Office. For the robotics competition, they built twin robots called Direction and Correction with a unique design. Their clever programs for the robots earned them the second place Programming award at the FIRST® World Festival. They started working on their research project and robot design in the summer of 2016. Competing in the World Festival was the culmination of nearly ten months of hard work, learning, and teamwork.
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