MONTVALE—Saying, “We killed at the competition,” Team 1676 Pascack Pi-oneers coach Lisa Ruggieri delivered great news from the inaugural event of the competition season at Mt. Olive High School March 2–3.
“We won the FIRST Mid Atlantic Mt. Olive FIRST Impact Award, the Mt. Olive District Event, and our team member Giulia DiSalvo is a Dean’s List Semifinalist for the District Championship,” Ruggieri told Pascack Press.
Your local robotics team, at press time, is gearing up for its second music-themed “Crescendo” contest of the year, at the Montgomery District Event this weekend in Skillman, N.J.
Pascack Pi-oneers is a competitive high school robotics team composed of students from Hillsdale, River Vale, Montvale, and Woodcliff Lake. Each year, notes Student CEO Eliza K. the team participates in the FIRST Robotics Competition. “We work alongside professional engineers to build a full-size robot through hands-on, real world experiences.” Students lead the team and its varied subdivisions.
Eiza helped lead the team’s Robot Reveal Night festivities Feb. 27 at the Pascack Hills High School Cafeteria, where guests turned out to celebrate the team’s 20th season.
Members of the local STEM community met the team, enjoyed the 2024 robot demonstration—the robot earned oohs and aahs when the crowd saw it hoist itself up bodily, on chains, to complete its tasks, including ejecting foam rings into target slots—and learned about the team’s local and global outreach efforts.
Montvale Mayor Michael Ghassali attended, as did many of the team’s valued sponsors and family members—including wide-eyed youngsters perhaps getting their first glimpse of a robot in action.
According to Team 1676, the FIRST Impact Award (formerly the Chairman’s Award) is the most prestigious award at FIRST, which was founded by Segway founder Dean Kamen.
“It honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the mission of FIRST. It was created to keep the central focus of FIRST Robotics Competition on the ultimate goal of transforming the culture in ways that will inspire greater levels of respect and honor for science and technology, as well as encouraging more of today’s youth to become science and technology leaders,” the team says.
With its 2024 build, the team said Velocitraptor’s drive team and pit crew “worked tirelessly to keep the robot working at its best. They achieved a record of 10-2 for qualification matches, entering playoffs as the first seed.”
The challenge for Velocitraptor was an “alliance” event, requiring nimble partnership to meet complex technical and strategic goals. “As the #1 Alliance Captain, we chose Team 222 the Tunkhannock High School Tigertrons from Pennsylvania, and Team 5438. from St. Peters Prep in Jersey City,” said the team on its website.
We last wrote about the team in advance of this Valentine’s Day, as the team was undertaking its annual Valentine’s Day Food Drive.
For more information, including team philanthropy, projects, gallery of robots, information on their world championship, and sponsorship opportunities, visit team1676.com.