Garden City Middle School
Robotics Teams will find the answers
Last month, two teams, Robo Monkeys and Trojan Army Robotics, from the Garden City Middle School Robotics Program competed with their robots during the First Lego League (FLL) practice tournament. Assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction Dr. Teresa Prendergast and Dr. Elena Cascio, the district’s 6-12 science coordinator, attended the event to show their continuing support for this terrific STEM program in the Garden City schools. The teams have a new coach, Brittany Kupferman, middle school earth science and eighth grade science teacher. Under Kupferman’s energetic leadership, the two teams placed well above half of the total competing teams. Four teams from the Garden City community also competed in this popular and rapidly growing program. Many of those students will be poised to join the middle school team when they reach sixth grade.
The event was held at Ronkonkoma Middle School and was attended by 60 FLL teams from across Long Island. The event was sponsored by School-Business Partnerships of Long Island, Connetquot School District, the Connetquot High School FIRST robotics team parents’ booster club, and the Smithtown HS Robotics Team.
For this year’s FLL Challenge, FLL World Class, over 265,000 children from 80 countries will redesign how we gather knowledge and skills in the 21st century, and our two teams will be among them.
While last month’s practice tournament focused only on the robot component of the competition, the Qualifying Tournament, to be held at Mineola School District on Jan. 31, also includes presentation of the project component. All Long Island FLL teams will present their innovative project to the judges, demonstrating teamwork abilities and explaining the mechanisms of the thought processes behind their design.
All participants, Kupferman and the chaperones from the Garden City School District should be commended for their incredible spirit!
Best of luck at the regionals to team members:
Robo Monkeys: George Arianas, Jack Arlotta, Trey Bauer, Mark Beckman, Stephen Debany, Joanthan Gardyn, Max Genova, Scott Henneberger, Bradley Jeffrey, James Lynch, Aidan Rosenblatt, Lennox Simone, and Zachary Ortiz; Trojan Army Robotics: James Burke, Catalina Carew, Stavros Cherpelis, Vincent Dinapoli, Julia Flaherty, Matthew Hughes, George Pamas, Jamshed Panthaki, Skyla Rivera, Elias Shane and Arianna Vranka.
