Ontario school on top of the robotics world after FIRST showdown

April 23, 2008

Governor Simcoe Secondary School participates in the Toronto regional FIRST competition

An Ontario high-school robotics team won the top spot at the annual FIRST Championship this weekend in Atlanta, finishing this year with a record of three regional wins, a championship division win and world champion status.

Every year, students from Governor Simcoe Secondary School in St. Catharines, Ont., form the Simbotics, an extracurricular group at the school in which students design and build a robot from the ground up to perform a specific task. At the finals, they were teamed up with students from Texas and Michigan to defeat 350 other teams.

Since the beginning of the year, 1,500 teams from eight countries have competed in regional competitions to advance to Atlanta. The Simbotics won a trio of regional competitions in Toronto, Waterloo, Ont., and the Midwest to get to the finals.

It was the sixth time the team competed at the finals but they have never nabbed gold. This year in Atlanta they won their “Galileo” division to advance to the “Einstein” finals. During these competitions, they were partnered with the ThunderChickens of Sterling Heights, Mich., and the Robowranglers from Greenville, Texas.

The competition is played out through short games using remote-controlled robots. The robots are designed and built in six weeks (out of a common set of basic parts) by a team of high-school-aged young people and a handful of mentors. The students pilot the robots on the field.

Every year is a different game. This year’s game was FIRST Overdrive, a fast-paced game involving driving robots around a circular 54-by-27-foot track as quickly as possible while carrying or tossing giant balls across two finish lines. The track is divided by a fence into a red side and a blue side, and the fence is crossed by an overpass marking the red and blue finish lines. Two three-team alliances race around the track in a counter clockwise direction manipulating Trackballs. Robots need to be durable, fast and powerful in order to compete successfully.

The team played 18 matches over three days at the Georgia Dome. They emerged from the Galileo division with a record of (7-0-0) in the qualification matches and (6-0-0) in the elimination rounds. After a loss in the semi-finals, the team’s alliance obtained two wins to advance to the finals (defeating the “Curie” divisional champions).

FIRST is an international organization that was founded in hopes that it would inspire students to pursue a field in engineering. The ultimate goal is “to transform culture, making science, math, engineering and technology as cool for kids as sports are today.”

Simbotics’ industry sponsors included General Motors St. Catharines Powertrain, Industrial Encoder Corp., IDC Tectonics Ltd., Mettler Toledo, Metal Supermarkets and Niagara Industrial Supply.
www.simbotics.org