Texpand FTC 2024

Team Texpand is a Cape Town based robotics team invited to compete in the FIRST World Championships. Last year we were crowned the South African FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics champions and travelled to Houston, Texas to represent South African in the World Championships where we were the first African Team to be awarded the prestigious Think Award, recognizing excellence in engineering thinking and process.

This year we have a much more competitive robot and are expecting to do even better on the world stage. We plan to take only 9 team members, but we still need funding for 2 team members (Isa Adams and Nikela Cele) and 1 adult, plus funding to cover the pre-ordered lunches at the world championships.

The FTC competition provides challenging and exciting hands-on opportunities for high school students to develop practical stem skills while having fun. Each season, teams have a few months to build robots to compete in a timed game against other teams’ robots – kind of like robotic Olympic games - but each year the game is different.

 

However, for Texpand, FTC is more than a game - it is about growing in and expanding STEM skills – Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Team members have learnt and applied many concepts from the fields of physics, coding, applied mathematics, 3D design, design process, sensor integration and more. What they have learnt and applied , they have then taken out to teach and share with other emerging STEM teams and under-resourced communities around Cape Town - assisting and training primary school robotics teams in Athlone, running Robotics Activation workshops and drawing new apprentices into our team to develop them into future FTC team members. Texpand's mission is not only to represent South Africa on the world stage, but also to inspire and train other young South Africans in the STEM and robotics fields. So far Texpand has impacted over 500 youth through schools and organisations in Cape Town, assisted 35 emerging FTC teams around the world and launched 8 new Robotics teams. They are hungry to have an even greater impact!

 

 

And here is where you can help that dream become a reality. Texpand needs corporate and individual sponsors to partner with them to fulfill their dual mission. Sponsorships will be used towards travel expenses to enable us to compete at the World Championship and any balance put towards outreach workshops.

 

To help make contributing as easy as possible, we have opened up a number of channels for you to make contributions. You can:

 

We have also developed a tiered sponsors structure for corporate sponsors, with varying levels of exposure and reward for their brand.

All the details for these options are available on our website sponsorship page.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIu57tROjoM