The Brighton High School FIRST Robotics team, which won the world championship last year in Detroit, held the season kickoff event recently and invited robotics teams from all the high schools in Livingston County to the event, held at the Brighton Center for the Performing Arts.

FIRST is an acronym which means “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”. According to Brighton Schools Superintendent Greg Gray, the event was well attended, with several hundred students, parents, and coaches in attendance. On a related note, Superintendent Greg Gray tells WHMI the co-captains of the Brighton TechnoDogs robotics team for 2020, Amanda Whitley and Aaron Last, were privileged to give a presentation before the Michigan Board of Education in Lansing Tuesday on their achievement in winning the world title.

Last April, the TechnoDogs won the overall title in the FIRST World Robotics Championship. In the competition, high school teams from around the world built and coded industrial-size robots and competed with other teams in field games designed to test their robotics skills and creative solutions to problems. The BHS TechnoDogs were the lead group in the Darwin Division, which formed a 4-team alliance to win the world championship. The other teams in the alliance were from Philadelphia, Sterling Heights, Michigan, and Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

At its first meeting of 2020 on Monday, the Brighton school board accepted the donation of $2,750 to the BHS robotics program from FIRST in Michigan to be used for supplies and equipment purchases. (TT)