COASTAL OBSERVER

It’s hard to get teenagers excited in a digital era, said Rayna Smith, who teaches science at Waccamaw High.

It turns out that building a robot is one way to get around that.

“That’s what it’s about, to get them off devices and here learning some engineering, some teamwork, some problem solving, communication,” said Smith, who coaches the robotics team. “These are the future leaders right here.”

She guides them when they need it, but that’s rare, Smith said. The young team, mostly made up of freshmen and sophomores, didn’t wait for Smith to tell them where to start.

Chatter about improvements, the rip of electrical tape and the sharp scrape of a blade slicing through plexiglass filled Smith’s classroom while other county students were enjoying the first day of their spring break on Good Friday.

The seven members of the Wired Warriors team didn’t seem to mind giving up their vacation to make final tweaks to their robot ahead of the state competition in Anderson, which began Thursday and runs until Saturday.

“They’re definitely committed, and it shows this year,” Smith said. “The amount of growth they had this year is really amazing.”

Only four students are returning team members. That includes Gabe Coats, a junior who has been with the Wired Warriors since eighth grade.

Coats is a self-taught coder.

“I had to learn from scratch, basically,” he said. “We’ve gotten a lot more advanced with our programming and out drive and everything else.”

“As Gabe has grown in his coding skills, that allowed us to grow in what we could do as a team,” Smith said. “They’re kind of going hand in hand.”

The robotics team began as the Paranoid Androids in 2018 with Drew Dozier as the faculty adviser.

Everett Plunket, a freshman and first-year member of the team, is responsible for the wiring, or what he called the “nervous system” of the robot.

Plunket began wiring as a hobby in middle school. Being a part of the Wired Warriors gives him the opportunity to work on a “big, practical” project with others, he said.

He said the controller area network, or CAN, wiring, which delivers information to the robot, is the most difficult part since it has to run an unbroken loop to every essential component.

“It’s just kind of keeping track of what connects to what. That’s difficult because of how tangled it is based on the small space,” Plunket said.

Robotics competitions are hosted by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a nonprofit.

Robotics season begins in January when FIRST releases a new game. Teams have until the first competition to build a robot capable of performing tasks in the game.

The Wired Warriors competed in two district events last month. The team won its first Imagery Award in North Charleston. That’s given to teams with distinctive branding.

Each team gets 12 qualification matches. Teams compete in “alliances” of three teams picked at random and changed for each match.

“They have to come up with a strategy, kind of on the fly, because now you have to say, all right, we know what we can do. What can your team do?” Smith said.

During the competition, teams stand behind plastic panels and maneuver their robots, typically with a console controller, through a large arena being used by five other teams. The three teams that make up an alliance must work together to score points by shooting yellow dodge balls, called “fuel,” into a tower in the middle of the arena. 

Waccamaw’s asymmetrical robot, named “Phil” by the team, moves at 28 feet a second and shoots three to four balls in that space of time. Phil is able to sweep up the balls using a spinning roller lined with flexible, foam-like fingers. There’s another spinning roller that launches the balls nearly 15 feet in the air.

After the qualification round, the top eight teams then get to choose alliances for the final round. The goal is to become the alliance captain.

The Wired Warriors introduced hanging tokens this year with the team logo and number, 7084. The tokens double as a trophy and a reputation builder. They are handed to alliance partners after a win.

“In the past years, we were just happy to hopefully get picked. Now we’re to the point we’re becoming our own alliance captain, and we get to do the picking,” Smith said. “That’s really exciting for the team to rise to that level.”