Earlier this February, the FSS Robotics Team won the Judge’s Choice Award in the Eastern Pennsylvania Robotics Qualifier (EPRQ), hosted by First Tech Challenge (FTC), for their notable community outreach initiatives and unique robot design. Despite not qualifying for state competition, their most recent results inspire confidence in their ability to build a competitive, community-driven program.
On February 17, the Robotics Team, George Foxbotics, competed at a regional robotics tournament where they won the Judge’s Choice Award. According to the competition, the Judge’s Choice Award is reserved for “a team they have encountered whose unique efforts, performance or dynamics merit recognition, yet the team does not fit into any of the existing award categories.” The judges specifically awarded George Foxbotics the “Creative Roboticized Fundraising Award,” for their Valentine campaign, where they outfitted their robot, Georgina, with holiday decorations and delivered flowers and cards to Upper School students.
Co-Captain of George Foxbotics, Oren Pipano ‘25, said the team didn’t expect to win. “We were definitely surprised to win the award. We actually left the competition early because we didn’t expect to win anything, so we found out online,” he said.
Despite the surprising result, Co-Captain Juliene Jones ‘24 thinks that what the team did was unique and deserving of the award. “We really blew them away. It reflects our creativity and our uniqueness, the fact that we thought outside the box, but also we took those fun ideas that we had, and we turned them into something impactful that raised money and that brought back interest in our club,” she said.
The objective of the FTC competition that George Foxbotics participated in centered around designing, building, and programming a robot to demonstrate a specific task. According to Oren, the challenge at the EPRQ involved placing hexagonal pieces, called “pixels” onto an inclined board; the more pixels your robot placed on the board, the more points you received. Additionally, teams could score points by launching and landing paper airplanes into tiered landing zones. To increase the difficulty, the competition rules stipulated that the robot’s body cannot exceed eighteen inches in any dimension.
To maximize their success, George Foxbotics showcased their creativity and thoughtfulness by incorporating several neat features into Georgina’s design, including a paper airplane launcher, an AI-driven camera to identify pixels, a specialized intake system to pick them up, and a mechanized arm to place pixels onto the board. According to Juliene, the team started by taking the base they made last year and iterating its design. Oren and Juliene agreed that sticking to one design was one of the most challenging parts of the process: “It took a little while because we went through a bunch of different iterations of it and we spent a lot of time on different designs…We couldn’t spend as much time on the final design,” Juliene said. From there, Oren noted that Georgina’s design relied heavily on custom 3D printing, laser cutting, and copious amounts of glue and duct tape for last-minute fixes.
Despite their efforts, George Foxbotics could not advance to the next competition. Still, the team is confident that winning the Judge’s Choice Award will bring momentum to future contests and outreach programs. “We’re out of the tournament, but our position as a team improved, and we’re on an upward trend,” Oren said.
According to Oren and Juliene, the Robotics Team has a busy second half of the year; the team is planning a science day for the Lower School and other schools in Philadelphia, and they hope to compete in Kinetic Derby and RoboJawn, two other robotics competitions planned for the spring.
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