RoBugs tournament winners are (l-r) William McCray, Kacy Jones, Emily Kornegay, Taylor Bodiford, Zac Latta, Adam Keller, and Andrew Wurst.   

    Thomas County Central’s robotics team, the Cybertechnic Stingers brought home the “Winning Alliance” trophy after winning the final round in the FIRST® Tech Challenge (FTC) state qualifier sponsored by RoBugs of McDonough, Saturday February 2.  This win qualified the team to advance to state competition to be held next month.   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 Cybertechnic Stingers placed 6th out of 17 teams during the qualifying matches.  This ranking allowed the team to participate in the final rounds.  In semi-finals, the Stingers and their alliance partner easily won both matches to advance to the final rounds.  After losing the first match in the finals round, the alliance team won the next two, giving them the championship title for the tournament and advancing both teams to state.  Coach Laura Kornegay said, “I was pleased with the team’s performance during the qualifying rounds, but to win the final rounds was thrilling!  I am very proud of how hard the team worked and happy that it paid off for them.”

   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.

   Because this is the first year for the robotics program at TCCHS, the LEGO Foundation provided a grant to help the program get started.  Patrick Harden, Siemens Water Technologies, mentors the TCCHS team by helping with programming and giving feedback in design.

   For more information on the FTC and other FIRST robotics programs, go to www.usfirst.org.