Ste-Marie robot wranglers grab silver at provincial competition

A small team of students at École Ste-Marie in Azilda brought home a silver medal recently from the 25th annual Ontario Technological Skills Competition in Waterloo.

On May 5, the Ordilions team of Jacob Sylvain, Rogan Gutwillinger, Sophie Beauchamp and Maxine Lemieux, joined more than 1,900 student competitors from across the province to demonstrate their technological prowess in the robotics event.

The team earned the right to attend the provincial competition by placing first at the intermediate level in the Great Robotic Challenge organized by the Conseil scolaire catholique du Nouvel-Ontario (CSCNO) in March.

“The students had a month to prepare their presentation, build their robots and do the programming for the challenges,” said École Ste-Marie teacher JoAnne Gagnon Beauchamp in a news release. “However, since the details of the specific tasks were only unveiled on the day of the competition, students had to be resourceful and modify their programming on the site of the event in order to succeed.

“All of their efforts were well rewarded when they learned they had won the provincial competition’s silver medal.”

The team took their robots through several challenges. The first was to calculate the total area of three boxes of different sizes. The second was navigating through a maze as quickly as possible. And in the last challenge, the robot had to pick up a cube and detect whether it was white or black, then place the cube in a designated location.

The robot also had to count the number of cubes of each colour and calculate their percentage of the total.

“This result testifies to our teachers’ outstanding work in providing a quality French Catholic education that will enable our students to become outstanding citizens who can excel in the 21st century,” said Lyse-Anne Papineau, CSCNO director of education, in a release.