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The Hazelwood West High School and Hazelwood Central High School robotics teams have advanced to the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) World Championship competition in April 24-27 at the Edward Jones Dome.

128 teams from around the world complete at the world championship, bringing over 30,000 competitors to the Dome.

The Shrapnel Sergeants, Hazelwood West High, advanced from the FRC St. Louis regional competition held at Chaifetz Arena on March 15 and 16. The RoboHawks, Hazelwood Central High, advanced from FRC Cincinnati regional competition on March 24.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), is a national program founded in 1992 in New Hampshire. FRC is designed for head-to-head competition using a sport themed activity. Teams of students are responsible for designing, building and programming robots to compete in an alliance against other teams. Teams, including coaches, mentors and volunteers, are required to develop a strategy and build robots based on sound engineering principles.

Through FRC, students get to apply real-world math and science concepts and develop problem-solving, organizational and team-building skills.

This year, the FRC game is called Ultimate Ascent. It is played by two competing alliances on a flat, 27 by 54 foot field. Each alliance consists of three robots. The robots will compete to get as many discs into their goals as they can during a two minute and fifteen second match. The match ends with robots attempting to climb pyramids located near the middle of the field. Each robot earns points based on how high it climbs the pyramid. The robots cannot be more than 112 inches in perimeter, no more than 84 inches in height and cannot weigh more than 120 pounds.

The RoboHawks also won the Industrial Design Award at the St. Louis regional competition. Sponsored by General Motors, the Industrial Design Award celebrates form and function in an efficiently designed machine that effectively addresses the game challenge.

The new Hazelwood East High School robotics team, the Tech Titans, also competed at the St. Louis regional event at Chaifetz Arena.

The Shrapnel Sergeants and the RoboHawks are looking forward to the World Championship, and have already begun preparing for the competition.