Northern Secondary School students engineer success
For the first time at Northern Secondary School, students are designing, building and testing a robot to compete against 30 others in the FIRST Robotics Canadian Competition to be held this April at the Hershey Centre in Mississauga.
Daunting as it may seem, whichever team wins will then face finalists from 17 regional competitions at the FIRST International Championship at Epcot Centre, Florida.
But the group’s leaders Bryan Samis, Pedram Salehi and Alex Levy agreed building a robot is not about winning or losing.
In their opinion their objective is only to field a robot that completes its task of placing balls into goals and then returning that goal to the starting point (in previous competitions a large number of robots were not even able to even move from their starting position). Furthermore, Samis explained that this being only their first year they could build on their experiences during following competitions.
"They are obviously not getting a credit for this in school so they are all doing this in their spare time," said Samis. "So, you’re learning a lot about electronics, a lot about engineering. There’s a huge commitment because we’re here at 7:30 every morning and a lot of the time we stay until 6:30 at night and we’re responsible for our homework also."
The students said that teachers or even professional engineers mostly build many of the robots being fielded by American teams.
In contrast, Northern students are building their robot with only a kit provided by FIRST and the knowledge they have gained in their classes. Teachers only supervise, although when the students get into a real jam the students will rely on offers of assistance from several corporate sponsors.
"We decided we wanted the students to do this, you learn the ropes better that way," commented Samis. "That’s not to say you don’t learn a lot from watching people with experience doing it, but I think it takes away from the experience if the students don’t do it themselves."
While at present the robot consists of a scattering of joysticks, electronic parts, schematics and a chassis, it will eventually resemble those seen on the Discovery Channel’s Battlebots program (except it will be designed to play a non-contact game).
Overall, the construction involves students in a diverse range of programs; shop students are welding the chassis, architecture students are designing the ball-collecting device because they are familiar with Autocad and computer programming and electrical engineering students are working on the controls.
After the six week time limit is up the robot will be submitted for an inspection by the event organizers to ensure that the students have followed the competition’s extensive rules that dictate which parts they can and cannot use and so on. The students are also planning to build a replica of the playing field, of the same size and using the same props, to test their robot.
