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Congratulations to our former principal, Dr. Putnam, for being officially appointed as Superintendent of the Penfield Central School District! Dr. Putnam has been a huge supported of FIRST Robotics and STEM education and we look forward to continuing to work with him!

Once again, the team competed at the Finger Lakes Regional Competition in RIT. This time around, we advanced through the quarter-finals into the semi-finals before losing to another alliance. We won the Spirit Award during the first day of competition, and then during the final awards ceremony on the next day one of our students won the Dean’s List Award. Tess Kremer, the award recipient, will now be a contender for the same award at the Championship level, as will other Dean’s List winners from around the world. Good luck to her!

From March 18th-21st, we competed at the Festivale de Robotique in Montreal, Canada with nearly 50 other teams. We ranked in 7th after a complete turn-around in our scoring the morning before. One moment we’re getting less than 20 points, the next we’re getting over 100 points. The 2nd place team asked us to join their alliance as their first pick, but our alliance lost in the quarter-finals. However, during the awards ceremony, the Judges only had one thing to say to our team: Mission accomplished. We took home the prestigious Chairman’s Award, which means we are heading to the World Championships in St. Louis!

One of the many teams that Rolling Thunder has supported is FTC Team 6996 Oncoming Storm. Oncoming Storm is a second year team with 15 students from Bay Trail Middle School in Penfield, New York. Nine out of our 15 students are returning from last year.  At our qualifying tournament at St. John Fisher College, we made it to the semi-finals as an alliance captain, and won the Inspire Award, thus advancing to State Regional Championship Tournament at PACE University. At PACE, we made it to finals as an alliance captain.

We lost finals, but that changed after a single email. A couple weeks after the PACE tournament, our head coach received notice from the head of FTC for our region. The email said that six teams were supposed to qualify from PACE, however, only five were informed at the tournament. We were the sixth ranked team, therefore we are moving on to Super Regionals at the University of Scranton in Scranton, Pennsylvania from March 19 to March 21!  To prepare for this, we reorganized our sub-teams and created a student leadership committee.

 On March 19, the Storm will rise again!

On March 18^th, the team is going up to Montreal for the Festival de robotique! We’re very excited for the trip, and can’t wait to get there! We’ll be there from the 18^th to the 22^nd. The next week on March 26^th, the team heads to our local venue of RIT! There, the Finger Lakes Regional is held. Come see us on Friday and Saturday, March 27^th and 28^th! We’re always welcome to people who are loud and love to cheer!