On December 8, 2018, students from four counties competed in a regional robotics competition in an effort to qualify for the FIRST Lego League super-regionals in Columbus, Georgia. Dougherty County is proud to report that four elementary teams earned a spot in the super-regional competition due to their presentations at regionals. These teams were Alice Coachman, Radium Springs, Sherwood, and West Town.

On January 14, 2019, the 4 teams traveled to Columbus to compete among 34 schools from across the region. Students were excited and nervous, but well prepared by their coaches. The super-regional competition included 3 tournaments due to the large number of teams. Each team competed in the categories of Core Values, Project, Robot Design, and Robot Performance with the theme, Into Orbit. Students from Dougherty impressed the judges and came home with three trophies!

Alice Coachman and Sherwood won the trophies for Core Values in their respective tournaments. During the core values competition, students must demonstrate how they used the FIRST philosophies of Gracious Professionalism and "Cooper-tition" as they built and coded their robots. First, the team completes a team challenge so the judges can observe how the team works together. Then the students complete a presentation to express how they used the core values of Discovery, Innovation, Impacting their world, Inclusion of all people, Teamwork, and Fun. Teams are competitive, but they are always looking for ways to cooperate with and share with other teams so that all teams demonstrate their best abilities.

Radium Springs won the trophy for the project in their tournament. For the project, teams choose a real-world problem that is relevant to the “Into Orbit” theme. Students research the problem and solutions that have already been tried, talk to an expert or experts in the field, then use the engineering design process to develop their own solution to the problem. Teams are expected to present their research and solution during the competition, but also earn credit for sharing their project with their local community before the competition. Radium completed a project to create a healthy and delicious way for astronauts to get the vitamins they need while traveling long periods of time, in space. Their solution was the development of Astro-candy.