Connor has tried to be part of the robotics team at Sinclair High school (FRC #1075) for a couple of years but due to a series of unfortunate events, it has not happened. This year the teacher decided he wasn’t moving forward with it so Connor came to me and explained to me what FIRST Robotics Canada was and asked if we could find him a team. We were put in touch with the amazing William Neal from FIRST Robotics. He explained there were not any teams for us to join in our area, so if you know us, if you can’t find it, make it!! With the full encouragement and support of Willam (who is currently our second mentor to get us started) we formed a team with Connor, Hailey and Greyson. We were also introduced to Peter Domjancic who has mentored on the Sinclair team so he joined our ranks too.
William put us in touch with other teams for support (have I told you how amazing this company and their people are?!?!?) and I had a Zoom call with Christine from FRC Team WAFFLES who had a wealth of information for us. William also helped us get a grant for most of the registration fee! So amazing. And then the coolest thing happened….
We were invited to the STEMley Cup in Hamilton for this past weekend. We were invited as the Pre-Rookie team meaning we were paired with one of the hosts, Team 4039 – Team MakeShift and we used their robot from last year to compete. Unfortunately, Hailey wasn’t able to attend so Greyson and Connor happily took some assistance to be a team to compete. Connor and Greyson were the drive team.
The morning was qualifiers and after a 20 minutes of, “this is how you drive”, the boys started to compete! After the qualifying rounds, they were team 19 out of 27!
The second half of the days is the competition. Each round has three teams that play in alliance. Before we start the top eight teams get to pick their teams. There were three teams that wouldn’t be picked. The two top teams in the world were at this competition and no surprise, they were number one and two. The top team picked the second team and they accepted. Everyone else went around twice picking their team. On the third round the top one and two teams PICKED OUR TEAM!!!!! They said that the boys consistently improved and they had become really good at balancing (you will see it in the videos) and they needed that skill to round off their skills as a team (a full three robotic balance I believe is 21 points!) That was our first, “this can’t get better”!
Then, they boys won an award! The imagery award! You got that this was the STEMley Cup? And the badges looked like jerseys. We wanted to be Canadian and so we wore hockey jerseys as a team and got the award for our team branding! So amazing!
So then the matches…..and WE WON!!!!! CHECK OUT THE TROPHY WE GOT!!!
Kick off for this year is January and we have some work to do before our two big competitions in March. We need three more team members and we need sponsorships!
This organization is so amazing and the kids…ohmygosh! I have no words for how amazing everyone is.
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