Pei Gang, president of our school, Chen Yiyi, vice president of our school, Ken Hongruse, vice president of North Asia of PTC Company, the sponsor of the event, and the director of the Admissions Office of No.9 School of Excellence attended the opening ceremony.
Pei Gang said in his speech that the purpose of the activity is consistent with the training goal of "excellent engineers" advocated and being promoted by Tongji University, that is, to cultivate students’ innovative consciousness, practical ability and teamwork spirit. In recent years, Tongji University has paid attention to the exchange, cooperation and effective connection with middle schools, and made some attempts with its brother universities in the aspect of independent enrollment, and worked together to cultivate outstanding talents and engineers. At present, China is going from "Made in China" to "Created in China" and "Designed in China". In this process, universities that take talent training as the first element have great potential and must be promising.
Hong Rusi said that PTC strongly supports the competition, which is highly designable and creative, and encourages young students to create unique solutions through team communication and cooperation, and can apply the scientific and technological concepts in the classroom to practical engineering problem solving.
On the morning of March 4th, the Shanghai final of FIRST Science and Technology Challenge started in the International Conference Center of Jiading Campus of our school. Twenty-seven teams of high school students from Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Hefei and other parts of the country gathered at the venue with their robot works, among which 15 teams were from China and 12 teams were from foreign students from some international schools in China, such as Shanghai American School and Hangzhou International School. Each team shall have no more than 10 players at most. Two teams form an alliance, and every two teams play against each other.
According to the requirements of the competition, each team should design, build and control a robot whose length, width and height are no more than 46 cm. It must have strong and dexterous limbs, which can not only push a bowling ball up the slope, but also pick up the boomerang balls one by one, put them into small boxes, and then stack the small boxes. Excellent performance in all aspects, the winner who scores more points.
On the field, I saw robots easily flex their arms, push the ball uphill, pick up the ball and put it in the box, and stack the small boxes with small balls layer by layer. The wonderful performance of the robot won applause and cheers from the audience.
There are 10 awards in the finals of China Division, including Champion League, Runner-up League, Science and Technology Enlightenment Award, Innovation Award, Design Award, Incentive Award, Thinking Award, Logic Award, Liaison Award and China Ambassador Award. Among them, the "Science and Technology Enlightenment Award" is the most important award in this competition, which is used to reward teams with outstanding scientific and technological innovation ability and challenging spirit.
According to reports, the "FIRST Technology Challenge" is an international robot competition for high school students sponsored by the American non-profit organization FIRST (for inspiration and recognition of science and technology). Today, about 250,000 high school students participate every year. More than 100 universities in the United States, including MIT, Yale University, Carnegie Mellon University and other famous universities, support the FIRST robot competition, providing students with up to $7.4 million in scholarship applications. According to reports, one out of every nine MIT students participated in the FIRST project in high school.