This past week, April 27th – 30th, the AdamBots traveled to St. Louis for the 2016 FIRST World Championships! This exciting event gave us an incredible opportunity to meet different teams, explore St. Louis, discover scholarships and career opportunities, and have a lot of fun.

After arriving in St. Louis late on Tuesday night, we had a lot of fun checking out the Innovation Fair and the pits on Wednesday! The Innovation Fair was an exhibition of many of FIRST’s sponsor companies and organizations, such as the Air Force, Disney, and Boeing. We received a lot of free swag, like selfie sticks from Boeing!

Boeing Innovation Fair Lambot pit pic
Thursday, April 28th was the first day of qualifications matches. We won 3 of our 4 qualification matches and also scouted other teams on our field. Many AdamBots visited the pits to meet a variety of teams from different countries. In the evening, we attended the opening ceremony, which featured speakers like Megan Smith, the United States Chief Technology Officer, who encouraged us to pursue STEM careers and continue to innovate beyond FIRST. Dean’s List Winners were also announced at this event. Congratulations to all the amazing students recognized on Dean’s List!

We had a fantastic second day of matches on ‪Galileo‬ on Friday, April 29th. We won three of six very close matches and continued to scout other teams. After all the qualification matches, we were ranked 20th on our field. We also visited the colleges at Scholarship Row. In the evening, we attended the 2016 General Motors Award Ceremony. Our mentors Mr. and Mrs. Drummer were awarded the Tom Stevens Award for mentoring! We also met with our sister team, Team LamBot 3478, at the event.

We had a great time at the playoffs on Saturday, April 30th. We were selected for the 8th alliance with Rogue Robotics (Team 2987), Aces High (Team 176), and the Pitt Pirate Robotics (Team 2642). We competed in the playoffs on Galileo, but we were eliminated during the quarterfinals. We had a great time collaborating with these amazing teams! After the division playoffs, we watched the final playoffs on Einstein. The matches were really intense, and congratulations to the alliance from Carson, including our friends the Beach Bots (Team 330), on becoming Worlds Champions!

Another notable item about this year’s World Championship was the attention and support from all the people working to #makeitLOUD. Grant Imahara, from MythBusters, came by the pits for a couple hours to show his support for STEM and FIRST, and will.i.am expressed his support in between the finals matches on Einstein. It was really incredible to see so many people excited about the future of STEM and FIRST!

The AdamBots are extremely grateful for having the opportunity to compete at Worlds this year. Thanks so much to our amazing sponsors, mentors, and volunteers for making this experience possible!

Written by Saniyah Shaikh

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