The First Robotics Competition is an international robotics community educating youth on future technological and societal advances. Teams of high school students are challenged each year to construct industrial-sized robots to compete in a challenging field game in cooperation with other teams.
STEM Minds has been proud to have sponsored the First Robotics team at St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic High School in Aurora, Ontario, for many years in order to promote science and technology within youth. At this year’s Aurora Street Festival, we invited the First Robotics team to present their annual robot to the public and talk about their competition experience.
Grade 12 student Christarn Thorg was their captain this year and has been on the team for 4 years. She enjoys working with a team and building a community of like minded people who share similar interests. She explains the competition process as follows:
“The first Saturday of every January, there’s a game reveal where the teams are given their challenge and have to create a strategy within the given restrictions. The first week is when they decide the plan and what they want to achieve. The next two weeks, they design the specific elements for the robots. Finally, they start prototyping their vision, and if it’s successful, they will manufacture it. All their robots are built in house with the help of a group of 10 mentors.”
This year’s challenge was “rapid reacts” where the team had to create a robot that can transport large tennis balls and shoot them into lower, middle, and upper hubs. Their robot was able to effectively shoot up to the middle hub. They competed in competitions at Humber College and York University where they landed 9th place, and St Mary’s Secondary School where they came in 8th. They earned the Judges’ Award at Humber for the strong information they provided on their robot to the judges. In addition, they received the Spirit Award for their excellent team spirit and collaboration.
We are very grateful to be able to support such a valuable community initiative and being able to help inspire young people in pursuing STEM passions. Great work FRC team; we can’t wait to see how you innovate next!