Robotics team earns bid to world championship
Team VERTEX powers Exeter to state championship to clinch a trip to FIRST Tech Challenge finale.
Exeter’s Robotics Club is sending a team back to the world championships after claiming the state title in the FIRST Tech Challenge competition.
FTC VERTEX will join teams from around the country and world in Houston in April for the worlds, a competition which has grown over three decades from its New Hampshire roots.
Inventor Dean Kamen founded FIRST — For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology — in 1992 and hosted the inaugural robotics competition in a Manchester high school gymnasium. Today, Exeter is among more than 3,700 high school teams and 46,000 students participating in STEM-related competitions sponsored by FIRST.
PEA joined FIRST in 2018 and promptly found success, qualifying for worlds in the team’s first season. This year, the club featured three teams — VERTEX, Surface and Edge — in the state championships, where VERTEX took prizes for best robot and the Innovate Award for “the ingenuity, creativity, and inventiveness to make their designs come to life.”
Isabella Vesely ’23 is VERTEX’s captain, and Deborah Ang ’24 and Tanish Tyagi ’23 are the team’s mechanical and programming leads, respectively.
Learn more about VERTEX and the Robotics program here.