Tonight we were at the Closing Ceremonies. We were sorry to know the event was ending, but excited to have been nominated for the Inspire Award. Closing Ceremonies started about 4:30 in the afternoon with the finals for both FTC and FRC. It was great to see the finals for both programs combined into one event.
After several hours of robot matches and other awards, it was time to announce the FTC Inspire Award. They started reading the script that described the winning team. The clues in the first sentence didn’t indicate a single team.
Then they started talking about how the team had jump-started FLL, and we wondered…
Then came a reference to our trackball mechanism, and we were pretty sure it was us. But we still had to wait until the announcer read it out:
“The winner is Team 3491 FIX IT from Victoria, Canada!”
FIX IT was declared the winner of the 2017 Houston FTC World Championship Inspire Award!!
The Inspire Award is given to the team that truly embodies the “challenge” of the FTC program. It is an apt recognition of the many hours that the team put in over the past year—not only in building and programming its own robot, but in helping to establish, coaching and mentoring no fewer than seven new teams in Victoria—essentially singlehandedly re-establishing an FTC league in British Columbia, after years in which it was the only team.
This is a great finish to the year.
We had a great time celebrating with our family and FTC friends, and FIRST even provided the fireworks!