JONES COUNTY, Ga. — We went to Jones County, where one of the school's robotics teams got pretty far in a statewide competition that tested those stem skills.
Turner Woods Elementary School 5th grader Gia Backus says her robotics
"In the beginning, before I started getting into it a lot, I didn't know how I felt about programming, and I tried it, but later on, I started liking it," says Backus.
Gia's robotics team is celebrating making it to the state championship in the First Lego League competition. Gifted specialist Rachael Williams says it's the second time the school has done that.
"We had a regional competition. We scored high enough to go to a super regional competition, then scored high enough to go to state.
There were 480 teams in Georgia and 17 teams in the competition at the state level. This year's theme was super-powered, so things have to do with power and energy.
"They have to research a problem and through that problem devise a solution or prototype to work through it," says Williams.
That's just one part of the competition. They had to find a solution to the problem and theirs was building a wind turbine.
"It is based upon a direct current which they did with a hairdryer, so they used that direct current to create electricity," says Williams.
The team didn't make it to nationals, but Gia's still happy about the opportunity.
"One thing I'm going to take on is that there's a lot of clean energy sources and the experiences I got from it," says Gia.