Innovators Robotics is a robotics team made up of Miami Valley high school students. The 2014 team has twenty-one members from nine different districts: Vandalia Butler, Dayton Regional STEM Academy, Bellbrook, Oakwood, Versailles, Ohio Virtual Academy, Miami Valley CTC, Wayne and home school students. Versailles High School Junior Chad Rindler is a member of the Innovators Robotics Team.
For the second year the Innovators will be conducting a robot demonstration at Versailles Poultry Days. Visitors will be able to see the robots the team competed with as well as opportunity for hands on experience. The demonstration will be conducted from 1-2 pm in front of the Versailles School Administration building.
The team ended another successful season by winning: The Engineering Inspiration Award at the Central Illinois Regional in Pekin, Illinois. The Gracious Professionalism Award sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, at the Cincinnati “Queen City”, Regional. In April the team qualified and competed at the 2014 World Championships in St. Louis, Missouri.
“The Engineering Inspiration Award” Celebrates a team’s outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering within a team’s school and community. Innovators Robotics achieved this award by providing forty-seven Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) demonstrations over the past year to schools, organizations, business and community events. Innovators earned this award by supporting area science camps and mentor/supported FIRST Lego League Teams (FLL) and FIRST Tech Challenge Teams (FTC). Innovators with another FTC team created YOUTUBE videos to help FLL teams with the 2014 challenge and created a training video for the new FLL EV3 software program (brick).
“The Gracious Professionalism Award”, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, is an award that exemplifies a way of doing things that encourages high-quality work, emphasizes the value of others, and respects individuals and the community. Innovators’ won this award, with their FIRES (FIRST Innovators Robotics Electronics Strategic) system. This is a Predictive Analytics Scouting System developed by the Innovators, is a Business Intelligence System which collects and processes of turning large amounts of data into useful information that decision-makers can use to make real time decisions and address critical issues. Once the robots have competed in several matches, the software was able to start predicting the outcome of future matches and with this data allows the team to develop strategic decisions based on the data collected. Innovators’ allow teams to review data, to improve their accuracy and increase their scores.
Since beginning in 2010 the Innovators have had seventeen seniors graduate through their program. Fifteen are pursuing engineering at four year universities, one is studying International Studies, and one is serving in the US Marines. These graduates have received over $788,000 in scholarships from their respective universities.