Two Florida high-school teams won the world championships of robotics engineering at an international competition held April 25-28 in St. Louis, Mo. The competition is sponsored by For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), an organization founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen.
A team comprised mostly of engineering students from Middleton High School in Tampa, Fla., won the division in which robots were required to collect balls, place them into crates and then elevate them as high as possible. The Hillsborough County engineering magnet school is a certified Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM) academy.