Thirty students from Jim Elliot Christian High School in the Central Valley city of Lodi will travel to Israel on March 9 as the only U.S. team to compete in Israel’s annual FIRST Robotics competition, which will take place March 14 to 16 in Tel Aviv.
Staff from the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco honored the team at an event Feb. 22 at the Lodi school.
In 2006, the robotics team at the private, 200-student school began placing Israeli flags on its robots to show support for the Jewish state.
At a robotics competition in Atlanta last year, a retired brigadier general from Israel noticed the blue and white flag and asked Jim Elliot’s robotics coach, Tom Bray, if his team would like to come to Israel the following year for a competition in Tel Aviv.
The Jim Elliot robotics team, Raptor Force Engineering, will spend the first four days of the trip in Israeli students’ homes on a kibbutz near Tel Aviv. The team will compete against 51 Israeli teams, one team from Turkey and one from Bosnia.
After the competition, the team will travel to religious and historic sites around Israel.