Bellarmine College Preparatory Robotics Wins Top Honor at National Competition; Chairman's Award Recognizes Team for Exemplary Sportsmanship, Mentoring.

News Editors/Education Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 21, 2004

Bellarmine College Preparatory today announced that its robotics team, Team 254, or the Cheesy Poofs, has been honored, out of a pool of 1,000 other teams, with the FIRST Robotics National Championships Chairman's Award. FIRST's most prestigious award, the Chairman's Award recognizes a team's commitment and efforts toward the organization's mission -- building partnerships among people, seeing the impact these partnerships have on their lives, and creating an appreciation of science and technology.

Bellarmine's Team 254 is a partnership between NASA Ames Research Center, Unity Care Group, Inc. and Bellarmine College Preparatory. In the five years since their inception, Team 254 has grown from the smallest FIRST team in the country to one of the competition's most successful. As part of the Chairman's Award, Bellarmine's team won lifetime qualifying status for all future National Championships, two computers, a professional video camera, and consulting time with a Hollywood director who will come to San Jose to help produce a video to be shown at next year's Nationals. In addition, a $10,000 college scholarship will be awarded to one senior from the team.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), the largest robotics competition in the United States, is the brainchild of Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway Human Transporter, and Woodie Flowers, a mechanical engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The competition pairs students with professional, volunteer mentors in a quest for robotic superiority. Core to the competition is a philosophy that calls for competitors to help each other improve and strive to achieve more, with a goal of including more minorities, economically disadvantaged students and women in science and technology.

"FIRST Robotics is an ideal educational program and is a perfect match for Bellarmine with our motto of 'men and women for others,'" said Jim Urhausen, faculty advisor for Bellarmine's Team 254. "It gives students an opportunity to build real robots, with real challenges; and they get to do this with real NASA engineers. I believe that this program is on the cutting edge in that it enables our students to deal with real life challenges and to help others in their struggle to compete. This program allows our students to go beyond book knowledge and discussion to real implementation of those ideas."

In presenting the award, FIRST representatives focused on Team 254's overall sportsmanship and character, and activities such as mentoring and founding rookie teams both locally and across the nation, sponsoring LEGO League events to teach younger students about robotics, and assembling a mobile repair shop that assists and repairs robots for all participants in the regional competitions the team attends.

Team 254 wholeheartedly embraces the FIRST philosophy, mentoring teams in Hawaii, Alaska and California. Both of the Hawaiian teams, Waialua and McKinley, were finalists at the 2003 Silicon Valley Regional. Waialua won the Regional Chairman's Award and McKinley the Delphi "Driving Tomorrow's Technology" Award. The original Alaska team Bellarmine mentored (five additional teams have since emerged in Alaska), Team 374, the Icebreakers, won the Engineering Inspiration award at the 2003 Silicon Valley Regional. Team 254 is also very active in the FIRST Lego League (FLL), a partnership between FIRST and the LEGO Company. FLL extends the FIRST concept of inspiring and celebrating science and technology to children aged 9 through 14. Members of Team 254 have mentored four local Lego League teams and also provide volunteer support for local Lego League competitions each year.

In addition to mentoring new teams, Team 254 also reaches out to the existing FIRST community by sharing their practice field at NASA Ames before teams ship their robots out for the national competition. Team 254 was also one of the founding members of the Western Region Robotics Forum, which provides teams with annual workshops and off-season competitions.

About Bellarmine College Preparatory

Bellarmine College Preparatory has been educating young men since 1851, when it was originally founded on the same campus as Santa Clara University. The school has been at its current location on West Hedding in San Jose's College Park district for 78 years. Bellarmine students are educated in the Jesuit tradition of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, and are encouraged to become "men for others." While Bellarmine strives for academic excellence, the school also seeks to instill a sense of responsibility through a variety of community ministry and Christian Service Programs. Bellarmine has a current enrollment of 1450 and a faculty/staff of 150.