Gates Corporation has declared that they have presented the participants of the FIRST Robotics competition with scholarships. The six high school students have used Gates belt drive on the robots used for the competition.
Tribby Warfield, President Gates North America Commercial; Kyoyul Oh, VP, Technology; Eric Bjork, Production Application Engineer; and student winners: Benjamin Secora, Aaron Robertson & Preston Ohta.
Gates being the Diamond Supplier and Sponsor of the FIRST competition provided components to the participants and also contributed monetarily. The FIRST competition took place from April 27 to April 30, 2011 at St. Louis attracting as many as 2000 participating teams.
The contestants who won the Gates scholarships were Benjamin Secora of Brookfield, Dane Christianson of Aurora IL, Aaron Robertson of Shawnee, Patrick Link of Detroit Lakes, Ian Hartwig of Troy and Preston Ohta of New York. Each of the contestants submitted their winning robotic project to the FIRST competition and also provided a reply to a challenge question asked by the Gates North America Commercial Selection Committee. The intent of the challenge question was to bring out the creative and unique thinking in each participant. The scholarship was worth 2000 dollars. Apart from the prize money, the winners and their families were taken to visit the Gates Technical Center in Rochester Hills, which was dedicated to research and development in power transmission. During the visit the students got an opportunity to interact with the technical and engineering staff and learnt about the projects currently being executed at the Center and a visual tour of the high end labs. The president of the North America Commercial at Gates, was of the opinion that the FIRST competition stirs the imaginative aspect of young minds and channelizes their potential towards building a career in engineering.