Southern Tier Robotics is FIRST® Robotics Competition team 2053, based at Vestal High School in Vestal, New York. We design, build and program a robot every season, and we compete with it against teams from across the northeast.
What is FIRST?
FIRST® — For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology — exists to get young people excited about science and engineering, and to put them next to adults who do that work for a living. Its programs run from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade, and they are built around the same idea at every level: students learn the engineering by doing it, not by being shown it. There is a lot more about the organization at firstinspires.org.
What is the FIRST Robotics Competition?
The FIRST® Robotics Competition is the high school program, open to students in grades nine through twelve, and it is the one this team competes in. Every January, FIRST reveals a brand new game that every team in the world plays that year. Teams then get roughly six weeks to design, build and program a robot of about 120 pounds from nothing, and take it to a regional competition.
Matches are three robots against three. Teams are paired at random through the qualifying rounds, and then the top eight teams pick the partners they want for the playoffs. Win a regional with your alliance and you are invited to the world championship, where teams from every country in the program come to compete.
Team history
The team was founded in 2007 as Tigertronics, working out of Union-Endicott High School. Since then it has gained and lost mentors, watched students graduate high school and then college and go out into the workforce — and watched a fair number of them come back to mentor. Through all of it the robots have kept getting better.
FIRST cancelled its competition events in 2020 and 2021 because of COVID, and during that break the team moved its home to Vestal High School. We changed the name at the same time, to Southern Tier Robotics, because students come to us from more than one school and the old name no longer said so. Every robot we have built is on the history page.