GoFundMe: Bridgehampton Robotics Team Needs Your Help to Attend Competition

Bridgehampton Middle School technology teacher Judiann Carmack recently started a campaign on GoFundMe to help raise money for the school’s Robotics Team in order for them to travel to St. Louis, Missouri for the First Robotics Competition World Championships.

Carmack, along with teacher Ken Giosi, started teaching robotics at Bridghampton in Middle School two years ago.

“High School students were really keen to learn about it too and asked for an elective to be offered,” she wrote on the GoFundMe page. “We thought that the best way to learn about robotics at that level was to compete in a competition. Little did we know what we had in store.”

With some help from Debra Winters, the teachers teamed up together with 16 students and joined this year’s FRC - First Robotics Competition.

Winters found an incredible mentor for the team, Mark McLeod, and told them about a Rookie Grant that was available for first year teams.

After that the students and teachers built a “lean and fast” robot with the help of McLeod and students from Pierson Jr. Sr. High School in Sag Harbor.

The team worked long and hard to get everything together for their first competition at Hofstra and to their surprise, found themselves in 6th place going into the quarterfinals.

“It certainly was the toughest fun most of us ever had and we finished way higher in rankings than we ever expected we would,” Carmack wrote on the page. “That incredibly fun and rewarding experience was only topped by our winning the All Star Rookie Award at the end of the day.”

Winning that award gave the team the opportunity to compete at the FRC World Championships in St. Louis, Missouri.

In order to achieve that goal, the team is hoping to raise $15,000. Since the page was created last week, $1,575 has been raised.

To read more or to donate, visit their GoFundMe page.

Photo: Bridgehampton Rookie Team Supreme GoFundMe page

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