Two Oklahoma City robotics teams with National Weather Center ties will join more than 10,000 students from around the globe as Oklahoma’s representatives at the FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Championship at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis, April 23-26, 2014.

The teams were coached by our very own Travis Smith (with team members Bria and Maddie)!

Team “Baking Soda Volcano” from St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School won the FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL®, grades 4 to 8) state championship tournament at Edmond Santa Fe High on Saturday, the overall best of 60 qualifying teams.  In the 2013-14 FLL competition, “Nature’s Fury”, teams had to create an innovative solution to help people prepare, stay safe, or rebuild from a natural disaster and also design and program a robot to solve several missions on a table covered with LEGO models.  The team began their journey by visiting the National Weather Center in August to interview experts such as Dr. Kevin Kloesel of the Oklahoma Climate Survey and Ryan Barnes of the National Weather Service.  They also helped host a 20-team FLL / Jr. FLL exhibition at the National Weather Festival in November where they presented their robot and innovative solution, a danger-detecting remote-controlled hovering drone called the Search and Rescue Assistant, to many enthusiastic first responders and emergency managers.

Team “SHWEET” (Storm, Hazard, Weather, Earthquake, Eruption, Tornado), also from St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School, was invited to represent Oklahoma as one of only 40 teams from around the world in the Jr. FLL (1st-3rd grade) division.  They demonstrated their avalanche research and model to hundreds of visitors at the National Weather Festival as part of the Jr. FLL “Disaster Blaster” challenge.