Students from 12 Alamance County schools who are part of a robotics team based in Burlington will head to Houston, Texas to compete in the World Championships next week.
The Burlington-based youth robotics team will be among 600 teams from all over the world competing in the 2026 FIRST Championship in Texas from next Wednesday, April 29, to Saturday, May 2 , according to the company hosting the event, BAE Systems.
The team from Burlington, named the “FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) SeQuEnCe Team 7890,” recently competed in three events, including the FIRST North Carolina District competition held last month at UNC-Asheville, where they qualified to compete at the World Championships, the team’s lead mentor, Alan Kraus, said in an interview with The Alamance News.
The team won awards at all three competitions it participated in since mid-March, Kraus said.
SeQuEnCe Team 7890 (“Team 7890”) ranked eighth out of 120 youth robotics teams in the North Carolina District competition, according to FIRST, which describes itself as the world’s leading youth robotics organization.
Founded in 1989, FIRST offers competitions that are intended to foster innovation and build confidence – and provide hands-on experience in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields – for 853,000 participating K-12 students from all over the world, according to the organization’s 2025 annual report.
This year marks the first time that Team 7890 has qualified to compete at the World Championships, Kraus told the newspaper last week.
The Burlington team built a 150-pound robot that forms an “alliance” with two other robots and travels from one end of a field to the other in about three seconds, Kraus said in the interview. The competition field is about the size of a volleyball court, he said.
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While most participants tend to be geared toward engineering, youth robotics also “combines business, teamwork, finance, and marketing,” said Kraus. “They really learn presentation and sales skills, as well. “We have custom T-shirts designed by the students, who also put together the storefront and website.”
The roster for Team 7890 has expanded so much, to more than two dozen students, since its “rookie” year in 2019 that it now has a varsity and junior varsity squad, Kraus told the newspaper. “We go all the way down to sixth grade,” he said. “It’s a varsity sport where everybody will go pro. They are learning skills for the future.”
“We are one of the few teams in North Carolina that has a full field for practice in our shop,” which is located inside Holly Hill Mall, on the end of the mall closest to Publix grocery store, Kraus said.
“In fact, eight of the 24 teams selected for the State Championship playoffs spent time in our facility, including three teams that won this year’s State Championship that concluded [on Sunday, April 12],” he explained.
The team also hosts a summer camp for other local K-12 students to build Lego robots, said Kraus.
The team’s name comes from the number it was assigned, 7890, “which is a sequence,” Kraus explained, so the students named it SeQuEnCe Team 7890.
The Burlington team is comprised of students from public, private, charter, and home schools in Alamance, Guilford, and Orange counties, Kraus said.
Team 7890 includes students from seven Alamance-Burlington schools: Alamance-Burlington Early College, Alamance-Virtual School, Eastern High School, Graham High School, Southeast High School, Western Middle School, and Williams High School.
The team’s members also include students from the four public charter schools in Alamance County – Alamance Community School, Clover Garden School, River Mill Academy, and The Hawbridge School – as well as one private school, Burlington Christian Academy.
Team 7890 hosts local and state politicians, and more than 800 visitors per year, at its shop inside Holly Hall Mall. The team has held live demonstrations at a STEM Night that Burlington Christian Academy hosts at Burlington Sock Puppets games and rode on a float with its robot in the Burlington and Graham Christmas parades.
Students did a 20-minute demonstration of its robot that Team 7890 built and coded (or programmed) for Alamance County’s commissioners at a meeting in May 2025. For that demo, the students showed how the robot could reach up to eight feet in the air.
The2026 FIRST World Championships runs from April 29 until May 2 in Houston.
