Today was the Duel on the Delaware and Miracle of Education Book Drive. Five years ago, John Laroc of First State Robotics (a part of the FIRST organization) invited Success Won’t Wait to become a part of this annual event as a community service element to the establish robotics competition.

For anyone not familiar with FIRST, this is a truly amazing organization. Founded by Dean Kamen (inventor of the infamous Segway) this nationwide non-profit teaches kids about robotics, engineering, teamwork and competition. Led by adult volunteers and engineers, local teams are comprised of high school students who design, construct and ultimately compete with large scale, working robots. For someone who has trouble programming a cell phone, the things these kids do are nothing short of astounding!

Our part of the competition is the annual book drive. Each competition hosts between 15 – 30 teams (in our case all from the East Coast). Throughout the year, the teams collect used books from family, friends, churches, schools and more. They bring these on competition day to be weighed (they are budding engineers, after all!) and counted. The friendly rivalry sometimes gets a little tense as the numbers are tallied and a 1^st runner up and a winner are announced and trophies are presented. The winner receives, in addition to bragging rights for the year, a refund on their team’s entry to the competition.

This year, through the drive, we collected almost 5,000 lbs. of books! These teams really work so hard and we want to give them a huge thank you for their efforts! This year, the finalists were:

WINNER: Team 423                                     

1^ST RUNNER UP: Team Chuck 84              

 A big thank you, too to the other teams who competed and collected thousands more lbs. of beautiful books for our literacy projects:

Team 375

Team 1647

Team 365 – MOE

Team 1712

Team 433

Team 357

To learn more about the FIRST organization, please visit www.FIRST.com