On Sunday, Feb. 16, Thomas Edison EnergySmart Charter School (TEECS)’s Girls Robotics Team, Fembot, won their FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Competition and was awarded the Inspire Award (best team award) and advances to the NJ State FTC Robotics Competition.

The FTC Inspire Award is a formally judged award given to the team that truly embodied the “challenge” of the FTC Program. The team that receives this award is chosen by the judges as having best represented a role model FTC Team.

On Sunday, Feb. 9, Fembot, hosted their first Hackathon competition at TEECS. The creative minds at the Hackathon event suggested unique and innovative ways to defeat viruses such as the Coronavirus.

Some of their ideas included the use of various medicine including nanopills as well as various technology including databases and smartphone apps. All of these ideas were supported by an operational business plan to see these solutions through.

Also: Over President’s Day weekend, TEECS’ Speech & Debate Team: Yusra, Sarang, Akshat, Ayesha, Anika, Arnav, and Sudip participated in the Harvard National Forensics Tournament held at Harvard University.

Anika entered Double Octa Finals in the Oratory event.

Akshat was a semifinalist and was ranked 16th out of 574 students in Congressional Debate.

The tournament offered 11 individual speech events and five different debate events. Thirty-eight hundred participants from 431 schools and 37 states across the nation participated in this tournament.

Also: Thomas Edison EnergySmart Charter School celebrated Black History Month with special assemblies for all grades.

The celebration kicked off with guest speaker and author, Yvette Long. She spoke with the high school students about her book, African American History: The Untold Stories. She had copies of her book for the school as well.

Students in Grades K-8 welcomed special guest TAHIRA from “Young Audiences Arts for Learning” with her program, “Freedom Stories.” In her performance, she tells the stories of freedom fighters while giving a compelling look at the people who took extraordinary risks for freedom.