Provided by Aaron Hanson and Brigette Wiegand: In addition to Brigitte’s Mentor of the Year Award, 2 of Foothills Middle School teams are also bring home trophies for their world class work this season.
FBI: Female Bot Intelligence (Asanatou, Lucia, Miranda, Annaliese, and Taylor) - received the STEM Research Award.  Their presentation on a robot being developed at Harvard to help pump a heart wowed the judges.  Not only did they do an outstanding job reading and learning about their subject, they called and interviewed Harvard researchers, the Boston Medical Center and journalists to find out more about the robot.  Still wanting to learn more, they participated in a local heart dissection workshop to have a better understanding of the heart and the task their robot needed to perform.  In the end, their well polished and confident public speaking skills really sealed the deal the team.
Froot Loops (Jason J., Preston, Nick, Sawyer and Liam) - received the Design Award.  This award goes to the team that is able to thoroughly and effectively document their engineering design process and how they tackled the specific challenges presented in this year’s game  It really speaks to the team’s ability to communicate, problem solve, think closely about small details and above all else revise and improve their ideas countless times.
Although they didn’t ultimately win any awards, the other teams had noteworthy accomplishments of their own.
VEXMEN (Sam H., Alek, Matt D., Isaac L. and Brennan) - had the best robot teamwork, driving and programming skills performances of all of our teams.  Their ability to score points was consistent throughout the competition.  Their ability to stay calm, even as the competition got very step, really paid off.  We are extremely proud of their consistent effort.
Lord of the Rings (Gunnar, Isaac R., Noah, Austin, and Everett) - Of all of our teams, these guys managed to fit in the whole Worlds experience better than any other team.  It’s hard to summarize how much there is going on at an event this large.  But as a team, these guys never really slowed down.  They meet with, strategized with, and practiced with nearly all of their alliance partners, including teams from the UK and Beijing.  They also managed to meet an incredible number of other teams from around the world to chat about each other’s experiences as aspiring engineers.  They got to spend time talking with Super Builders (the Pros) and see some amazing creations.  They tested new virtual world environments in the vender booths.   And above all they simply enjoyed the journey and had fun.
Overall, FMS' program met and worked directly with teams teams from Lebanon, Pureto Rico, Canada, Paraguay, Turkey, Ethiopia, Finland and China.  (They don’t call it the Worlds Championship for nothing.)
They are also now an official part of a Genius World Record.  Over the past week, this year’s competition had 1648 college, high school, middle school and elementary school teams from 50 countries, making it the LARGEST robotics competition in the world.

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