BEST National Championship April 23-24 in Dallas

The first annual national championship for BEST Robotics will be held April 23-24 at the Dallas Convention Center in conjunction with the Vex Robotics World Championship.

Friday will include the team’s Exhibits, Marketing Presentations and a special Robot Showcase & Exhibition. The day’s activities begin at 9:30 am and end at 7:00 pm.

The robotics competition, slated for 8:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. on Saturday April 24th, will feature the top four teams from each of the three regional BEST Robotics championships held throughout the US in 2009. All of the events on both days are free and open to the public.

BEST Robotics Inc (BRI) is a non-profit, volunteer organization based at Auburn University in Auburn, AL. The idea for a BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology) competition originated in 1993 when two Texas Instruments (TI) engineers, Ted Mahler and Steve Marum, were serving as guides for Engineering Day at their company site in Sherman. Together with a group of high school students, they watched a video of freshmen building a robot in Woody Flowers' class at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The high school students were so interested that Ted and Steve said, Why don't we do this? With enthusiastic approval from TI management, North Texas BEST was born. The first competition was held in 1993 with 14 schools and 221 students (including one team from San Antonio). Today, BEST has more than 700 middle- and high-school teams with more than 12,000 participating students.

BEST features two parallel competitions: -- a head-to-head robotics contest, typically with a technology-related theme, where teams compete in a series of three-minute, round-robin matches, and -- a BEST Award competition, given to the team that best embodies the BEST concept, Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology, as judged by their overall design process, technical documentation, exhibits and presentations.

John Martini of Fort Smith, Ark., president of BEST and a faculty member at the University of Arkansas - Fort Smith, said everyone involved in BEST is enthused about the championship.

We are excited about this opportunity to showcase our talented students and dedicated coaches, mentors and sponsors," said Martini. "I truly believe the greatest strengths of our BEST family are its dedicated volunteers and sponsors. We know that they stay involved because of our unwavering commitment to the students."

Martini said as BEST continues to grow and position itself for the future that everyone wants to stay rooted in the principles BEST was built on -- student-designed, student-built, student-driven robots at a cost that allows any school to participate.

"BEST exists to inspire those students to be tomorrow’s technicians, engineers, scientists, scholars and inventors," said Martini. "So, we want everyone to join us as we celebrate the accomplishments of student teams, as together we promote the BEST game in town."

The national championship will consist of the 2009 game "High Octane!". The head-to-head competition will feature a seeding round robin tournament, a semi-final round robin tournament and a final-four tournament. Also included and on display will be the teams’ engineering design notebooks, community awareness exhibits, marketing presentations, and lots of public displays of spirit and sportsmanship.

For more information, contact John Martini at jmartini@uafortsmith.edu (479)788-7772 or Greg Young at greg.young@capitol-best.org (512)947-1649