YCMHS robotics team heading to Atlantic competition

By Tina Comeau

THE VANGUARD

NovaNewsNow.com

With a pirate theme that involves collecting treasure for points, the Yarmouth Consolidated Memorial High School’s robotics team will be scooping up lots of bling this weekend as it competes at the annual Robots EAST competition.

And it hopes to bring home some bling too.

Twenty-one high schools from the Atlantic region will be at the May 3 event – taking place at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton – in a competition that pits four robots on the playfield at a time.

The Yarmouth team – made up of students Vica Nguyen, Sarah Cooke, Logan Fuller and

J Horton, along with their teacher Robyn McKenzie – has been preparing for the competition for eight weeks, the timeframe given to all teams. They’ve refurbished last year’s robotics entry to suit their needs for this year’s competition.

And they’ve also added a secret weapon to their Captain Jack Servo arsenal.

Aside from gathering treasure on the playfield, there is a flag worth 20 points. But rather that trying to collect the flag themselves, the Yarmouth team intends to prevent everyone else from getting their hands on it.

(But we can’t tell you how since it’s a secret and this reporter does not want to be forced to walk the plank.)

All the team members will say is if the other teams go after the flag in a way and design the Yarmouth team suspects they might, “they’re screwed.”

Robots EAST (Exploration and Awareness of Science and Technology) provides high school students with the opportunity to design, build, and test robots, which can weigh no more than 30 kilograms and must fall within specific size restrictions. Although the work takes place outside of the classroom, what the students learn can be directly applied back to the curriculum.

“It’s totally about physics and all of the concepts,” says their teacher.

And it’s this that appeals to team members.

“Engineering is something that really fascinates me,” says Fuller, whose immediate goal is to take aerospace engineering at the University of Toronto.

“My eventual goal is to be a pilot of either an airline and my long-term goal is to maybe some day be an astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency,” he says. “I’ve always been fascinated by anything that flies, rockets, airplanes…so this has really helped me a lot to get the physics base that you need.”

His teammate Horton would like to pursue engineering beyond high school and sees the robotics program as a good way to practice and design physics concepts.

Nguyen, on the other hand, joined the team because she wanted to the opportunity to work with McKenzie, something she doesn’t do during the normal school day since she takes biology instead of physics. Cooke, meanwhile, is one of McKenzie’s physics students, although her interest in robotics also stems from another area too.

“My little sister did her robotics at the junior high and I saw that it was LEGO and thought, ‘Okay, it was cool programming it’, but then I found out we get this big hulking thing made out of metal…YES!” she says.

The students say it’s interesting to be able to apply their physics knowledge in a hands-on way and Nguyen also has praise for their mentors – Adam Blooi and Leland Whitman – who offer their expertise when the team gets together on weekends.

Other areas of support have come from Tri-Star Industries, which has supplied materials for the robot, as well as the school’s IB program and NSTU local, which is helping out with some of the funding to get the team to New Brunswick.