MANITOWANING—The Assiginack Public School Lego Robotics team has advanced to the provincial technological skills competition two months from now after finishing first overall in their division at the Rainbow District School Board (RDSB) technological skills competition held at Cambrian College in Sudbury in late February.
“The students did a great job at the competition,” stated teacher Margit Alberti, coach of the Assiginack team. She explained RDSB hosted its 17th annual technological skills competition at Cambrian College in Sudbury on February 29. “The girls were super excited to go and were determined to make it to Toronto. I was acting as their coach and as judge of their event, so I couldn’t give them any guidance. I did help the other teams though.”
Along with the annual competition for secondary school students, new this year was an elementary school competition that saw 160 students from Grades 7 and 8 competing in five different categories including character animation, construction, LEGO Mechanical Engineering, LEGO Robotics and tv/video production.
“The Valley View Public School team were fierce competition and were a solid team, supporting one another throughout. They really knew what they were doing and their sensor code worked every time,” said Ms. Alberti. “The Little Current Public School team were less experienced but worked hard for the whole competition. They made huge gains in building, programming and teamwork. If they had had a few more hours, they would have been hard to beat.”
Ms. Alberti said the Assiginack team had to build their Lego robot with several attachments/tools for the robot to accomplish tasks that include moving the robot across a table, pushing, pulling, lifting and dropping an object, and doing all of this accurately.
“The runs were done in front of the teams and scored together to make sure judging was fair,” continued Ms. Alberti. “All the students were both precisely fair and kind to their competitors. When the girls found out they had won, they jumped around for a bit before commending their competitors. The teams all acknowledged what they learned from each other about code, building and teamwork.”
“The school board extended the competition to include intermediate grade students in the five categories,” said Ms. Alberti. “I am on the planning committee, and we selected the five categories for the competition.”
“And our school was one of the three entered in the Lego robotics,” said Ms. Alberti.
Members of the Assiginack Lego Robotics team include River Labell, Ava Hartley, Iris Spry, Jaleena Huang and coach Ms. Alberti. They will compete at the Skills Ontario competition in Toronto in May.
