THUNDER BAY — Three catholic senior elementary schools competed for a chance to attend the Skills Ontario competition in Toronto coming up in May.
Bishop Gallagher, EQ Jennings, and Pope John Paul made up 18 teams total – nine teams for the Lego robotics competition and nine teams for the green energy competition.
“Seventy-two future engineers are here with us, problem solving, collaborating, doing teamwork, designing, testing . . . (with) the staff, the coaches, and the people that are here watching, you can feel the intensity after each event,” said Thunder Bay Catholic School Board technology coordinator Paul Mackett.
Mackett said the for the Skills Challenge Day, they take designs directly from the Skills Ontario competition in Toronto.
The green energy competition was Mackett’s specialty, where teams built a wind turbine.
“The students are allowed to design any type of blade that they want to fit their turbine. It has to fit within a 24 by 24-inch box where we have the fan pulling air over the fan blades, which creates the turbine to spin, and then we measure the amount of bulk output on each team as they take part.”
Marcy Barry is the experiential learning consultant for TBCDSB, and specialized in the robotics side of the competition on Wednesday.
“This year it's a disaster area that they have to move some toxic packages out of the way and then rescue a (lego figure) off of the challenge table. They have to come with their robot and in the morning they're spending their time testing it and doing programming and coding in order for the robot to do the tasks that they're asked in the challenge,” Barry said.
The winners are not selected solely based on the success of the Lego robot or wind turbine.
“Our judges were also watching them on a whole bunch of other areas and making sure that they were getting points for all of the areas throughout the criteria that they're given,” Mackett said.
The judges were looking out for team work and how much students learned throughout the process.
“Once our judges are done all of their scoring, we will award third, second, and first for both robotics and for green energy. The two winners will then be our two representatives at Skills Ontario in Toronto May 5 and 6 competing against approximately 26 to 27 other boards,” he said.
Barry said it’s amazing to see the growth in a short two years.
“Last year, we had the first annual competition where we only had two schools here and we had 5 teams on either side, this year with 9 on either side.
“We're really hoping to expand it and have a regional competition in the future where each board might have their own competition and then we all compete for a regional competition. We're looking to grow, looking for ways to expand, so we're really excited with the level of interest and engagement from both students and staff and our amazing judges too,” she said.
Mackett said he loves to bring this opportunity to students.
“Some of the schools may have had 50 to 60 kids come out to get one of four spots for their school. It's becoming bigger and better each year.
“This is only our second year and we're already at 18 teams from the three schools,” he said.
Matthew Dean, Grade 7 student at Bishop Gallagher, said this was his teams first year in something like this.
Dean said the group used a lot of teamwork strategies, like communication, to be time efficient.
He added that the balance was important for the turbine to have an appropriate speed, and result in a good score.
Dean said the group didn’t have a chance to test it out before the actual competition time, so they weren’t sure what to expect.
“We did a good job for our first year,” he said.
