Thomas County Central’s robotics teams, the CyberStingers, brought home two trophies and several other awards from the FIRST® Tech Challenge (FTC) CircuitRunners qualifier held at Wheeler High School in Marietta.
“While there are three different robotics teams, we all worked together to ensure success during the competition,” freshman and Green team member Hailey Ferrel said.
FIRST® Tech Challenge is a robotics competition for high school students based on a sports model. Teams of up to 10 students are responsible for designing, building, and programming their robots to compete as alliances against other teams.
“The competition this past weekend was a fun learning experience for every team,” junior and Gold team member Austin Ridley said. “Each of us learned a lot about the challenge and also got new ideas for the challenge.”
The CyberStingers Gold team brought home the Motivate Award. This award is given to a team that exemplifies the essence of the FTC competition through “team building, team spirit and exhibited enthusiasm.”
The Gold team was also recognized for its inventiveness and ingenuity by being named a finalist for the Innovate Award. For serving as an “inspiration to what this program, and the young minds involved, can accomplish,” the Gold team finished third for the Inspiration Award.
“You never know how well you can do at competition,” sophomore and Gold team member Steven Tran said “It’s best to know that practice and experience are not equal to how fancy or pretty the robot is. Overall, it was a fun experience.”
In addition to these awards, the Gold team finished fourth out of 19 teams during the qualifying matches. This ranking allowed the team to participate in the final rounds. In semi-finals, the CyberStingers lost to the team that eventually won the robotics competition.
“The robotics competition in Marietta was an exciting day for team 6988, CyberStingers Gold,” senior team member Chris Geer said. “Our robot worked nearly flawlessly. We had fun and learned a lot about ‘gracious professionalism.’”
The CyberStingers Green team brought home the Think Award. This award recognizes the team that best understands the role of the engineering notebook in the design process. The notebook focuses on the design and build stages of the robot.
“This competition opened my eyes to the different ways to do things and different ways to look at things,” sophomore Green team member Caitlin Simmons said.
The teams are coached by Laura Kornegay and Brian Bellamy. Locally, Evoqua and HD Supply Waterworks have supported the teams by helping with outreach. Patrick Harden of Evoqua serves as a mentor for all three teams.
“I truly appreciate the support we have received from the school and the community,” Coach Laura Kornegay said. “Outreach with the community and with other engineers is an important part of what the students do. They learn a lot by sharing their work with others,”
FTC is one of the FIRST® family programs. FIRST®is a non-profit organization devoted to helping young people discover and develop a passion for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Founded more than 20 years ago by inventor Dean Kamen, the FIRST programs involves youth, mentors, coaches, and volunteers from more than 60 countries.
Through FTC, students have the opportunity to design, build, and program robots, get hands-on programming and rapid-prototyping experience, apply real-world math and science concepts, document the engineering process, develop problem-solving, organizational, and team-building skills, learn about Gracious Professionalism®, compete and cooperate in alliances at tournaments.
For more information on the FTC and other FIRST robotics programs, go to www.usfirst.org.
“Robotics is the type of program that focuses all on the mind and how you act upon what you think up,” junior Kacy Jones said. “So competitions such as the one we have recently been to require a lot of thinking skills. The most important skill you need to know more than anything else, though, is communication and team work.”