At a July 15 meeting, the FSR board appointed Delaware’s new FTC/FLL affiliate partner, Eric Cheek, as the FSR program director for Diamond State FTC and First State FLL/JFLL. Dr. Cheek served as FIRST affiliate partner in North Carolina before moving to Delaware last year to become Associate Vice President for Adult Continuing Education and Summer Programs at Delaware State University.

The board voted also to create new program director positions for two FTC mentors of non-school related teams, Andrew Szeto with MOE FTC Team 365 and David Onstad with FTC Team 8528, Rhyme Know Reason.

Andrew, a Technical Lead Engineer in software engineering at Boeing, has mentored MOE FTC, a non-school affiliated program for high school students organized through FSR, since its founding in 2006. David is a senior research scientist in entomology with DuPont and is mentor to a new FTC team made up primarily of home school students.

Peggy Vavalla, First State Robotics board president said, “We are delighted to welcome Eric, Andrew and David to our organization. FSR has always strived to create more opportunities for students to learn about robotics and other STEM disciplines through Lego League and FIRST Tech Challenge. Our new affiliates and program directors will allow us to reach more students throughout the state of Delaware and we look forward to assisting their efforts.”