We are a 501(c)(3) Nonprofit Organization based in Chesapeake City, Maryland.  We have a homeschool FIRST Tech Challenge and a FIRST LEGO League team.

This is our rookie year as a FIRST Tech Challenge team, and we have 9 team members from Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. Our FIRST LEGO League team has 2 members.

The National Center for Education Statistics considers our meeting space a Rural area.  This is significant because studies show that rural students do not have the same resources and options to explore STEM as more urban students. According to the High School Longitudinal Study, “There is a severe gap between rural students and many suburban and urban counterparts regarding the benefits they receive from STEM-based curricula.” Our team is able to encourage STEM learning in our area to equal that of urban communities.  By welcoming students into our team, and trying to start new teams in our area we are greatly increasing our area’s STEM education.  Our team also fully supports FIRST’s inclusion and diversity efforts, and females make up half of our team. 

We started our journey as LOAD Robotics in 2015 with a FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Junior team. We competed in this program for three years, gaining experience with STEM and having fun. 

 In 2018, we aged into FIRST LEGO League Challenge. Our team evolved over the years, and we were able to win the Delaware State Championships four times, advancing to the World Festival in Detroit in 2019 and 2020. After Covid, we made it back to the World Championships in Houston, Texas in 2023, and then, in 2024, we won the Engineering Excellence award at the World Championships.  We also participated in the Lunar Legacy Invitational in 2023 in Flagstaff, Arizona, where we won the “Right Stuff” award. 

Now, we have aged into FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC), and are very excited to start a new FTC team this year.  LOAD Robotics will also compete again for one more year in the FLL Challenge as well.

Our goals for FTC are to learn about STEM and to develop a successful FTC team to compete in the Delaware region. We will also provide outreach to teach the community about STEM and FIRST programs with the hope of starting new FTC and FLL teams to help students in Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland.   To reach those goals we incorporated LOAD Robotics in Delaware as a Nonprofit corporation and received our 501(c)(3) status from the IRS.