January 9, 2018

Lindenwood University is serving for the first time as a sponsor of FIRST Robotics and hosted a regional event Saturday, Jan. 6, kicking off the 2018 season.

Approximately 340 high school students from 17 teams gathered at the university’s J. Scheidegger Center for the Arts on the St. Charles campus to view a live feed announcing the challenge for the 2018 FIRST Robotics competition, which will be held in March in St. Louis. For the competition, students must construct robots to play game with a specific set of challenges. The kick-off event Saturday was one of 138 held in 27 countries for more than 3,600 teams.

The gathering at Lindenwood was for teams from the eastern half of Missouri and southern Illinois. After viewing a video announcing the details of the game, team members were able to look at and interact with some full-sized facsimiles of the game pieces they had just seen described, set up in the Scheidegger Center’s Boyle Gallery.

The teams each received a kit of parts with which they will begin designing and building 170-pound industrial-grade robots to play the game described in the kick-off. In the competition, the teams will compete with and against others from the region and will have the opportunity to move on to the national and international levels.

“The FIRST organization has a tradition of successfully inspiring students in our area to be leaders and innovators in science and technology,” said Sara Wiedman, assistant vice president for enrollment management. “Anyone who has been to a FIRST event knows the excitement and passion emanating from these students is infectious, and Lindenwood was delighted to support an event that brought such an amazing group of students to campus.”

The event was covered by KTVI and KPLR TV news. The coverage can be found here.