Flower Mound TSA Contestants at the Regional meet at Byron Nelson HS.
What is TSA?
"Learning to live in a technical world."
The Technology Student Association is a non-profit organization created to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) Education. In order to do so, TSA provides over 60 technological competitions for students in member chapters to participate in. Open to all students enrolled in STEM classes, TSA's membership includes over 233,000 middle and high school students in approximately 2,000 schools spanning 49 states, plus Germany.
2016 FMTSA Officers
President
Vice President
Secretary
Sergeant at Arms
Treasurer
Historian
Flower Mound and TSA
The Flower Mound TSA Chapter (Chapter 619) was founded 12 years ago by current advisor Mr. Ralph Szydlik, the architecture and engineering teacher. Already compting in various robotics competitions such as FIRST and VEX, the students had a deep-seated background in STEM.
Since then, student interest has only grown. At first, TSA at Flower Mound was all about engineering and arhitecture. Now, students in Flower Mound TSA participate in Digital Video Production, Promotional Graphics, Webmaster, Video Game Design, and more.
Being a Texas chapter, students have the opportunity to participate in a wider range of categories with the Texas TSA Competitions, a collection of over 400 other competitions that recieve awards at the Texas State TSA Conference.
Chapter 619 in the Community
Every year, in addition to competing in the TSA Competitions, students in Flower Mound TSA organize different community activities.
One of the major things FMTSA does is the Flower Mound Robotics Summer Camp. This is a student-designed, student-led, and student-taught robotics program that takes place over two weeks. The goal is to provide a fun and challenging crash course in engineering, robotics, and programming to elementary and middle school kids.
Week 1 consists of building and programming a VEX Clawbot according to a guide. Week 2 lets participants get a chance to design and build their own robot to win the game.
In the summer of 2015, over 40 students from 5 Flower Mound schools attended the summer camp. 10 FMTSA members taught and ran the camp.
Other Club Activities
As the name suggests, The Flower Mound Robocs/TSA club also participates in numerous robotics competitions alongside TSA. These include the Vx and FIRST Robotics Competitions, along with any individual student endeavors.
This year, our clubhasdone extremely well in the VEX Robotics Competition. Due to the high number of students in the club, there were a total of 7 VEX teams, and 6 of them made it to the North Texas State Championships. Of these, two teams, 2019A and 2019F, qualified for the World Championships.
We also participate in FIRST, which is a club-wide effort. This year, the game was FIRST Stronghold, a medieval defense and siege themed game that involved building robust robots that could cross a number of different defences easily. Robots also needed to score balls by launching or rolling them towards the "tower." This year, we made it into the quarterfinals in the Elimination rounds in the second seed alliance.
