ROSSVILLE, Ga. (WDEF) – The Ridgeland High School Robotics Team might be a relatively new thing, but it’s already making noise on the world stage.  It’s a timely example of what’s right with our schools.

Mandi Dean is the team’s coach and advisor.

She says, “We just started our program last year. We had to kind of wait till after covid. So, these students have not only been building and programming robots, but they’ve actually started a program from the ground up.”

Junior Joshua Litts chips, “If you want total honesty, I thought it was kind of not my thing. And then uh… just found, found it fun.”

Classmate Evan Broome says, “My eighth grade year, we were really good. We made it to the World Championship, and then that got cut off due to covid, and we came to the high school, and I pushed to get a program started here my freshman year. We weren’t able to compete, but then last year we were able to compete, and we made it to the World Championship our first year.”

Coach Dean explains, “We have three different teams. They’ve all built, programmed, designed completely; worked in teams to engineer three different robots this year. Each year, it’s a new game. This year it’s called Spin Up, so each year, because it’s a new game, they have to completely design the robot from scratch to fit that game’s requirements. So, this year it’s kind of like disc golf a little bit. You have to pick up discs, shoot them in goals, do different things like spin rollers, fight off other robots.”

She continues, “It’s just neat for the students to kind of work through the engineering design process. So, they kind of document what they’re working on, what their plans are. They test out different designs. We’ve actually won three tournaments this year, which is kind of mind-blowing, that’s where those trophies came from, and that’s how we qualified for the state championship. At the state championship we made it to the semi-final, and we lost by one point. So, we were so close, but we were really happy with that finish. And because of that, we qualified for the world championship which we’re going in a couple weeks here down to Dallas. It’ll be 800 of the best teams from around the world, all speaking different languages, and it’ll be an exciting time.”

Sophomore Kylie Thurman can’t wait.

She says, “You get to meet a lot of new people. You get to experience a lot of new things, and you get…