Penticton high schoolers are heading to a robotics competition

Photo: FIRST Robotics

Penticton students will be competing with student-made robots like this at the FIRST Robotics competition in Victoria next year, if they can fundraise enough to attend.

A team of roughly 25 high school kids from Penticton have been accepted into the regional portion of a national robotics competition, and the team is working hard on fundraising to make their dreams of designing an award-winning robot come true. 

The FIRST Canada competition will see teams of 14 to 18-year-olds from around the region compete in Victoria with their robots in March, creating a robot responding to as-yet unannounced challenge rules. 

Tyler Legare and Josh Walker are teachers at Princess Margaret Secondary and started Penticton Robotics just recently, in response to someone from the FIRST organization reaching out and asking if they had enough students who wanted to participate to make a team. 

"We scrambled to get the application done, because we had just two days," Legare said, adding that the interest among kids from both Maggie and Pen High was not a problem. "I think right now we're at around the 23 to 25 mark for kids, which was definitely unexpected!"

The theme of this year's competition is "Star Wars: Force for Change," leading Legare to think Disney might be involved, but they won't know anything more about the specifics of the challenge the students will be tackling until Jan. 4. 

"We know it has something to do with resources and sustainability, and that's what the overlying theme is, but we don't know what the individual challenges will be," Legare explained.

"Everybody receives the challenges on the same day, and everybody receives the robotics kits on the same day."

He says the opportunity is a chance to bring a group of kids together to tackle a common goal, as the group is diverse in their interests. 

"It would be improper to say this is just simply a robotics club," Legare said.

"We have students in the club that really don't know a lot about robotics, but they are interested in the competition and they are kinda taking on the reaching out for sponsorships or media coverage, and we have people who are focusing on gathering the rules for past competitions and trying to understand what motors and voltages and things we're going to be working with, and then we have the ones interested in the coding and building and designing."

But the opportunity comes with a price tag of around $15,000 total and possibly more including entry fee, robotics kit purchase, travel, lodging and expenses. They have successfully received two grants covering about $9,000 collectively, but will be holding fundraisers and offering sponsorship options to fund the rest. 

"If we're able to bank money, that means more money we'll be able to spend next year, but also we have the ability to buy extra parts with the extra money," Legare said. "That's going to help them make the [robot] better."

The team will get to keep its robot and bring it back to the city as a learning tool at both high schools, which Legare hopes will spur even more interest and sponsorship for the program he hopes to grow year over year. 

That hopefully translates to more students getting involved. 

"It's trying to bring in all different types of facets of education, and show you how there is a correlation between it," Legare explained. "Bringing all different types of students together, I think it's all about unity, working toward the same goal."

The kids will be at the helm of the project the entire time without being told what to do by their teachers, Legare said, adding his and his colleague's job is only to facilitate funding and logistics in Victoria. 

"It's both exciting and horribly terrifying," Legare said with a chuckle. "Me and Josh really have no idea what this competition is going to be like."

The team would gladly accept any individual donations and are open to sponsorship options up to and including company branding on the robot. Inquiries about how to help can be directed to Tyler Legare by email at [email protected].

Follow the team on their website here or their Facebook here to watch for their fundraising endeavours and updates on their progress.