“We were down to the point where we had already built the robot and programmed it,” said Kulas. “We were trying to up our programming levels.” 

     Once the team had competed in the regular-season competitions, they had already had their robot completed. Since they wanted to be successful at the world-level competition, they went in and further perfected their robot build. 

The whole team is split into different groups to help efficiently and successfully build the robot, including the design, programming, engineering and marketing groups. The groups this year were able to come together to build a robot that competed in a series of competitions.  

      The team competed in a total of four competitions: two districts, states and worlds. Each season, the competitions have a certain task that the teams have to complete. This year the task was a basketball-type game, where each team had to program their robot to be able to shoot balls into different levels of hoops. Additionally, they had to program the robot to climb up rungs similar to a ladder. The Pitt County team did well enough to continue on to the world competition.

     “We ended up 26[th] in our field of 80,” said Kulas.  

     At the world competition, there are a total of 500 teams from all over the world. Due to the fact that so many teams competed, they were split off into fields of about 50 teams. 

     At any type of Robotics competition, there are awards such as imagery, spirit, engineering and innovation. This year at one of the district competitions, the Pitt team received the spirit award. Even though there are no scholarships awarded for participating in these competitions, there are many scholarships that team members can apply to through the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), which is the international competition for high school teams.