SANFORD, NC - In a world where automation and artificial intelligence are on the rise, a new extracurricular activity has taken shape in three district schools that is helping prepare students for the careers of the future. Earlier this year, Lee Early College (LEC) and Bragg Street Academy opened a robotics team to their combined student population and formed a team of students to compete in two competitions this year. Lee County High School was not far behind with Career and Technical Education teacher Donnie Eller organizing a team of students for robotics competitions as well.
John Weir, a teacher at Bragg Street Academy, helped push this idea to the forefront, working with Brett Tyler at Bragg Street and Treshawn Penny from LEC to put the group together. “I’ve done robotics for like the last 20 years at different schools, and we do not have enough students here at Bragg Street to do a team on our own, so I reached out to LEC, another small school. We figured that if we could get kids from both of those schools together they would work well together.”
Ultimately, they were able to get eight students involved, taking them to two competitions in the area. Weir said, “The main thing we wanted to do this year was start a team. We wanted to just start a team and see if we could get two schools to work together. We were able to do that this year. We also wanted to see if the kids got better over the course of the year, and they did.”
The most impressive thing about the two-school team is the way that the students were able to work together to quickly troubleshoot and solve problems, often without the same level of resources or parts that other competing teams would have. “Every time something went wrong or broke on the robot, they were able to fix it before the next match, they worked well together and accomplished the tasks that were required,” noted Weir. “Really the biggest problem for our team this year was not having enough money to buy the fancy parts and equipment that some teams are able to get, but we used what we had and the team really got creative with some of the ways they attacked problems.”
Lee County High School’s brand new robotics team also had a great start to their program, travelling to Greenville to compete in a large robotics competition that saw the Robotics team known as “the Sting” win the Rookie All Star Award from their first FRC Competition. (See the team’s robot in action; Robot 10354 on this YouTube link)
Team leader Tyler Buchear, a sophomore in the Academy of Engineering at Lee County High, said that the competition was one of the best parts of his year. “My favorite part was just going to the competition and experiencing the atmosphere and the teamwork with my friends to even build the robot,” indicated Buchear, who has been a part of the LCHS from the start when they started building their robot back in February.
Buchear and his teammates not only built the robot from scratch but were able to program and code the robot to be ready for their first competition that saw them land in the top 25 and earn the newcomer Rookie All-Star designation.
“I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but it was great to see how everyone pitched in to show us what we needed to know. We definitely learned a lot about how much we could bring to the competition. We only brought like one box with some screwdrivers and other basic tools, but now we have seen that we can bring a lot of tools and parts to make sure we can adjust as needed,” highlighted the sophomore.
Buchear is working towards his goal of being a mechanical engineer and that the robotics team has given him a great opportunity to build skills toward that job. “The team has really helped me work on problem solving skills and given me a platform to just figure out how to do things, just use my brain to put things together.”
Funding is definitely a huge piece of a competitively successful robotics program, Weir agreed, noting that competitive success is not always the end goal. “The main thing was that at the competitions, something always breaks and you only have five or ten minutes between matches to fix things. Our kids were always successful at fixing things before the next match, and that was huge. They have to creatively think how to fix things and solve problems, often without the right piece or part to fix what they needed to fix, using parts for things that they weren’t designed for, but that ended up working better.”
Weir and Eller have both seen their teams’ confidence grow over the course of the year, giving them an idea that things are really catching on. “The kids learn how to think on their feet and solve problems creatively in a group,” he said. “When we first started the kids were like, ‘Mr. Weir, we don’t know anything about building robots.’ I would always tell them that they did not have to, we would teach them everything they needed to know.”
Just like with the students’ flexibility in competition, Weir knows that you have to grow community partnerships and get the word out about what the student impact truly is. “We did get a $3000 grant from Central Electric Membership Cooperative, which is really going to help us this year, and we are in the process of buying some new things so we can be more competitive next year. Any time you are building from the ground up like we are, you have to stay flexible and ready to adjust as you see needs arise.”
