Love: Third Valentine’s Day Food Drive Feb. 1–13

FROM PAGE 1 and deliver the donated food biweekly.

N ilaweera says that since early summer, customers have donated more than 1,500 pounds of food to the overall collection effort.

The sturdy wooden bins stand by inside the store at the exit of Hillsdale ShopRite; you can drop off as well at the Hillsdale, River Vale, and Montvale public libraries; and at the lobbies of Pascack Valley High School and Pascack Hills High School.

You also can drop off dona- tions at the porches of 272 Ruckman Ave., Hillsdale; 38 Rivervale Road, River Vale; and 200 Glen Road, Woodcliff Lake.

And you can arrange for someone from the team to pick up your donations by writing piparents@team1676.

This is a busy time for Pascack Pi-oneers FIRST Robotics Competition Team 1676, a 74-person multi-talented force from the Pascack Valley Regional High School District. The team build season — when the team begins designing and building its competition robot — starts the first Saturday in January.

In the FIRST Robotics competition, teams design, program, and build a robot starting with a standard parts kit and set of rules.

Meanwhile, weʼre told the teamʼs management, outreach and design division is updating the website and creating apps, writing award submissions, creating graphics and team publications, creating an animation submission, and conceiving the team video.

The team is in the fourth week of build season, preparing for the FIRST competition season, which begins in March.

Nilaweera says the team is competing at Mount Olive High School and Warren Hills High School to start. “We competed with the robot at the 2022 FIRST World Championship in Houston, becoming semi-finalists in our division.”

Nilaweera says the team won the 2022 FIRST Mid-Atlantic District Championship Engineering Inspiration Award “for contin- ued STEAM outreach to the community and for mentoring FIRST teams internationally. We mentor teams in South Africa, Nigeria, Haiti, and Taiwan.”

And the team designed and created “Ready, Set, Speak!,” a website that uses verbal imitation to help children with autism and speech apraxia pronounce basic sounds and words. The website is translated into Spanish and is being translated into French in light of a new mentorship with a FIRST team in Haiti.

The team says itʼs proud to partner with the French Honor Society at PVHS and French teacher Mrs. DelGiudice.

And it says it partnered with the PHHS Medical Club to host its second Red Cross Blood Drive. For more voices from Team 1676 and its outreach in the valley, see “Delivering on STEAM: District robotics team building a ladder up,” Pascack Press, Dec. 25, 2021.

For more team information, visit team1676.com To sponsor Team 1676, write piparents@team1676.com