CRC Robotics Competition Archemedia

Nicholas was part of the St. George's School team participating in the CRC Robotics competition called Archemedia 2007. They teams built robots that have to haul 1 foot diameter rings around an arena and stack them up. Their team came in second place overall, as well as doing well in several sub-categories. This includes having a kiosk (booth) that placed in the top 6, for which I believe Nicholas was in charge. This kiosk featured a huge metal dragon (the school emblem) on a pneumatic cylinder that allowed it to go from floor level to about 30 feet in the air. The dragon blew smoke too. The background of the kiosk featured pictures of the team members and biographical information. In addition to a kiosk and a robot, the teams also prepared a journal documenting their activities, a video and a web site.


(click to enlarge)


One of the striking things about the competition is that is has the hype of a college football game. This includes large stands with screaming spectators and plenty of jumping around. Many other schools were involved including a technical school for adults, an assortment of private schools, CEGEPs (junior colleges) and some huge public high schools. Other notable features were a kiosk built by ECS School in which the students dress as mermaids, including having costumes with a single lag, an impressive robot from Laval that could pick up many rings at once (see below), and a kiosm constructed from water bottles. In this latter case, the audience was challenged to guess how many bottles the kiosk was constructed from. [ I guessed 3782, was within 14 of the right answer, and it won me a huge pile of candy. ]

Overall this kind of event is great promotion for science and engineering.