Beach Cities Robotics Wins Major Award

Beach Cities Robotics Team 294 www.bcrobotics.org was awarded the second highest honor bestowed on a team at a regional competition, the Engineering Inspiration Award.

Beach Cities Robotics Team 294 www.bcrobotics.org was awarded the second highest honor bestowed on a team at a regional competition, the Engineering Inspiration Award. This award celebrates a teams' outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering and engineers, both within their schools and as well as their community.

Criteria include: the extent and inventiveness of the teams' effort to recruit students to engineering, the extent and effectiveness of the team's community outreach efforts, and the measurable success of those efforts.

In addition to their three corporate sponsors, this team has been able to enlist more than forty other organizations to support their engineering efforts. They have reached out to their community through a weekly open house that has been so successful, it was listed on AOL's Digital Cities as one of the best places to go to in LA during that weekend. They are showing thousands of people how exciting engineering can be, seeding the crop of future engineers.

The team received the award at their first competition in Phoenix, March 14-15, 2003. Their next competition is the LA Regional, April 4-5, 2003, in the LA Sports Arena, free and open to the public, where they are eligible for the highest honor bestowed upon a team, the Chairman's Award.

The competitions are spirited, high-tech spectator sporting events pulsating to rock music, a vision of wild WWF style costuming, with time clocks, referees and cheerleaders. Beach Cities Robotics Team 294 is made up of two rival schools, MCHS and RUHS, combined to compete regionally and nationally together in FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology www.usfirst.org . Call 310-944-9334 for more details.

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