HOLLY SPRINGS — The Scotland High School “Scotbotics” team kicked off the competition season this past weekend, coming in fourth place with its alliance.
The team traveled to Holly Springs High School for the FIRST North Carolina District Wake County Event for the three-day competition.
During the competition season, the team will accumulate points at the competitions and at the end of the five-week competition season, the top 100 teams will go to states. The other opportunity to go to states is at the competitions where during the qualifying matches the teams join a three-team alliance and compete for the top slot.
The teams that come in first automatically go to state. According to Scotbotics advisor Kevin Combs, the team is in a nice spot currently and has one more competition to make it to states.
Combs said that, last year, which was their first year as a team, the students didn’t make it far in the competition and that is was a huge accomplishment for them to place fourth with their alliance. Since their beginning year, Combs says he has seen improvements with the team.
“We’ve had rookie team members taking on leadership roles, it’s become more student-centered,” Combs said. “So the advisors are able to watch more and let the students handle it compared to last year where we were all working and trying to figure everything out.”
Combs said that going into the program last year the team didn’t have much of an idea of what to do and were figuring it out themselves. Due to how well the team did working together and problem-solving, they were able to attend nationals where students and advisors were able to speak to more experienced teams and learn from them.
Something that Combs is proud of is how the new members to the team handled the event.
“At first it was overwhelming, its a sensory overload at these events and there’s a lot of pressure,” Combs said. “But I was pleased with how quickly they adapted. They learned very quickly and it was a growing experience.”
The team is currently preparing for its second competition and is working through what they can change for the next competition. Combs said the students use PDSA (Plan Do Study Act) to work through the season. Currently, they are working on the study stage, where they’re looking at data taken from the competition and trying to figure out how they can use it to make their robot better.
“We’re hindered by the building season, you only have a month and a half to build the robot,” Combs said. “Then we’re only allowed to modify it at the competitions so we have to figure out what will work best and how we can fit it into the five-hour window … Right now it’s time to study the data and find out what we can do better.”
The team will be at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke on March 30 to compete. The event starts at 10:30 a.m. and will continue Sunday. It’s free and open to the public.
Since UNCP is close to home, Combs is hoping that the team will have some local support come out to cheer them on.
“We’d love to invite the community and anyone who might want to sponsor the program and help us grow to come to the competition,” Combs said. “It would mean a lot to the students to have some local support.”
Reach Katelin Gandee at 910-506-3171 or at [email protected]
