STEM Corporate Charity Event at Altium Live Yields World Record Build Time!

STEM Corporate Charity Event at Altium Live Yields World Record Build Time!

The AltiumLive 2017: ANNUAL PCB DESIGN SUMMIT added a STEM Corporate Charity Event to their agenda – the TeamWorx STEM Charity Robot Team Building event. Altium in partnership with many of their clients and sponsors, donated $25,000 in robot kits to local robotics clubs in San Diego and Germany. The focus was on providing children in economically challenging neighborhoods the tools they need to become future STEM professionals. Locally in San Diego they chose Fab Lab, a part of Fab Foundation – an amazing organization that provides technology tools to students and others who would otherwise not have access. Originally an outreach project from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), Fab Labs are now helping students globally access current and emerging technologies! Altium is actively involved in sponsoring young scientists in many creative ways including teams designing shuttles for the Hyperloop!

Teams made up of clients, sponsors, and Altium employees built robots together, and then competed in a 20 team “BattleBot” style tournament. Each person had a chance to battle someone from another team, and if their team had the most individual victories they advanced to a second round. 5 teams competed in an all-bot melee to determine our two finalists. The final was an epic battle in front of over a hundred loud and yelling spectators. These two will be heroes long after next year’s STEM Corporate Charity Event ends!

The MOST AMAZING part of the entire night came when one of the teams – The Theta Titans – beat the previous World Record Build Time set by Ethicon on June 16, 2017 of 27:37. This All-Star team posted a time of 27:00 minutes even to create a new World Record Robot Build time for the “BattleBot” style robot! If you read our blogs going back two years you can see the evolution of the World Record and the companies who have held it. From literally hundreds or thousands of individual teams that have participated over the last 2.5 years, this team posted the number 1 fastest build time. Extremely impressive! Who are these All-Stars?

• Joseph Chiu from ToyBuilder Labs
• Artin Barseghian from Artisan Vehicle Systems
• Shawn Wilton from Shaolo LLC
• Thomas Hermary from Hermary Opto Electronics Inc.
• Caroline Hallat from Hermary Opto Electronics Inc.
• Rita Chen from Panasonic
• Darryl Black from ORBCOMM
• Cole Kievit from Tempo Automation

Congratulations to our new World Record holders!!

The best part was that over 200 people had a great time building together – something that actually worked, they had a ton of fun battling each other with robots they built, AND Fab Lab charity received over $12,000 in robot donations!