Thomas County Central High School Robotics teams finished their second tournament of the year with big wins and valuable experience gained.

Teams participated in the FIRST Tech Challenge South Georgia Area League Meet held Nov. 16 at Mitchell County High School in Camilla. CyberStingers Green (#8433) won all its matches and claimed the high score mark for its league this season. The team finished the tournament in first place.

“We were able to go undefeated because our team worked well together,” green team member Hailey Ferrel said. “From the designers, drivers [and] programmers to the coaches and captains, we worked together to set goals and followed a plan to meet those goals.”

The FIRST Tech Challenge theme this year is FIRST Relic Recovery.

“Teams score points by moving glyphs into cryptoboxes, transferring relics to recovery zones, retrieving jewels and parking on balancing stones,” teams sponsor Laura Kornegay explains. “Each match begins with a thirty-second autonomous period followed by a two-minute driver controlled period. Each team sets goals and designs its own robot to meet those goals.”

The school’s gold team finished fourth and blue team finished sixth.

"Our claw did not perform how we had planned for it to, but we have a design to improve it before the next competition,” blue team member Chris Wiggins said.

Kornegay admits “we hope to bring home the top three spots every time we compete” but stresses the robotics teams’ true goal “is to improve at every competition.”

“We are happy to see that all of our teams were competitive in this competition, and they all have ideas on how to get even better,” she said.

One of the big improvements the green team made in this competition was to add an autonomous program.