Houston: FASNY FTC Robotics Team 14903 is Back!

It’s official…our FASNY FTC Robotics team, 14903 SharkBots, advanced to the 2024 FIRST World Robotics Championship in Houston, Texas!

Will you help us get there?

A little bit about us…

We are the FIRST Tech Challenge robotics team SharkBots #14903, a motivated group of 10 students from three different high schools. We are grateful to FASNY for supporting this program by providing a dedicated space for our HQ.

Taking the team to Houston is expensive! Please help us defray the cost of travel, lodging, food, and registration.

NY Excelsior FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Winning Alliance Captain!

Since September 2023, we have been working passionately to create an innovative and competitive robot. While designing, building, programming, iterating, and creating custom 3D printed parts, we were also learning all aspects of the engineering process.

On March 3rd, our team competed in the 2024 New York Excelsior Regional Championship in Utica and won the final robot match (Winning Alliance Captain). We were first among the region’s top 28 teams and advanced to the FIRST World Championship in Houston (https://www.firstchampionship.org) April 17-20, 2024, where we will proudly represent the New York State Excelsior region and compete with 224 FTC teams from around the world, a venue with over 35 thousand participants and attendees!

We advanced last year to the World Championship by winning the Inspire award. We are proud this year to advance solely based on the performance of our robot and our wonderful driving team composed of Justin, Denis, Jack and Vincent!

More than a robot!

But a FIRST FTC program is more than creating a competitive robot! All year long, we shared our passion for STEM with our communities and taught robotics and coding to youth both locally and internationally (Tunisia/Burkina Faso). We also mentored 2 lego robotic teams and regularly demonstrated our robot to schools and at local events. We love helping others and organized a robotics tournament this year for the younger ones with more than 250 people participants, spectators and 40 volunteers. During the season, we invested over 700 hours and reached out to more than 1,400 individuals to spark interest in STEM.

This year we also connected with 13 professionals (engineers, programmers, teachers). With their generous support and guidance, we learned new skills and were exposed to career paths while sharing with them what we do.

Thank you to our community!

We are thankful to all individuals who helped us throughout this journey including FIRST volunteers who are making this program possible especially in our region, FASNY and our volunteer coaches and mentors!

We are also very grateful to our wonderful alliance partners we competed with during this season: team Tardis #5356 (also advancing to Worlds with a First Inspire award, https://www.facebook.com/FTCTardis5356/), Mechanical Meltdown (https://www.facebook.com/FTC12833/), and Ravena Rattlesnakes (https://sites.google.com/rcscsd.org/robotics-2019-2020/home). We depend on the excellent play and cooperation from our alliance partners and none of this would have been possible without them!

Thank you!

Last season you helped us raise nearly $10,000 and that covered most of our expenses for team lodging, food, robot transport, and registration.

Your kind support will help us go to the Houston WORLD Robotics Championship again!

We are asking for your gifts to help us defray our team expenses.

Your donations will help us cover:

Any contribution, big or small, will be helpful! We thank you in advance for accompanying us through this incredible adventure!

Team SharkBots (Jack, Justin, Vincent, Denis, Rafael, Inaara, Maia, Tristan, Clovis, Raphael and all our Coaches and Mentors)

// Check out our instagram: @ftc14903

// Website: https://www.sharkbots.org/home