Motorola Continues Its Commitment at FIRST Robotics Competition Championship for 15th Year

Motorola, Inc. (NYSE: MOT), a founding sponsor, will continue its commitment at the FIRST Robotics Championship, an annual event that teams high school students with professional engineering and business mentors, held April 27-29 at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. Students design and build a robot for a high-tech and high-intensity competition, complete with an immense crowd of spirited super-fans, team uniforms and logos.

Each year, Motorola engineers volunteer their time to be mentors and work with area students during a six week period, partnering to design and build robots that compete against other high schools while providing advice, support and encouragement. This year’s challenge, “Aim High” matches alliance teams of 3 robots against each other. Each team scores points by shooting undersized basketballs into various goals during a 2 minute and 10 second match. “Through Motorola’s ongoing support for FIRST, we have been able to inspire over 1,000 young people, proving math, science and engineering can be fun and rewarding,” said Eileen Sweeney, director of the Motorola Foundation. “Several students who participated in the program are now engineers at Motorola.”

Last month, Motorola was a sponsor of the Midwest Regional Competition, where two Motorola-sponsored teams from Schaumburg, Illinois and Plantation, Florida took home awards and invitations to the championship. This year, the FIRST competition will expand its reach to over 28,000 students representing approximately 1100 teams. The Motorola sponsored teams will compete with students from almost every state in the U.S., as well as from Brazil, Canada, U.K., Mexico, Ecuador, Ghana, and Israel.