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Queen's Engineering Students Create "Fantastic Learning Experience" for Local Kingston Students
Team 2809 from KCVI at the 2009 Greater Toronto RegionalNine current Queen’s students approached Kingston Collegiate Vocational Institute (KCVI), a local Kingston high school this year with a great idea: they wanted them to compete in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition, all competition alumni themselves.
FIRST was founded by inventor Dean Kamen in 1989 in order to develop ways to inspire students in engineering and technology fields. The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is designed to motivate high school students to become engineers by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers to develop a robot. FIRST seeks to promote a philosophy of teamwork and collaboration among engineers and encourages competing teams to remain friendly, helping each other out when necessary. The Greater Toronto Regional competition hosted 59 teams from across Canada and the northern United States.
Canadian Teams Excel at the FTC Competition at the FIRST World Festival in Atlanta
Seven teams from across the country represented Canada at the World Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. There were two teams from British Columbia: Team 245 - RCXRM from Roberts Creek and Team 2857 - the SHIM Stars from Surrey. Four were from Ontario: Team 27 - Polar Bear Robotics from North York; Team 541 - Jaguar from A. J Jackson C I in Toronto; Team 3431 - Thunder from Thornlea S S in Richmond Hill and Team 3341 - Black Shift Robotics from Sir Winston Churchill H S in Thunder Bay. Alberta was ably represented by Team 2820 - the Longhorns from Calgary.
All of the teams put in a very strong showing on their respective fields (Edison and Franklin each having approx. 50 teams). At the end of the first day of competition, Team 2820 was in 4th place, Team 245 was in 11th, Team 27 was in 13th, Team 2857 was in 14th, Team 541 was 24th, Team 3431 was 32nd and Team 3341 was 34th.
Team Feature - [FTC] RCXRM
RCXRMRCXRM is an FTC Team from the Sunshine Coast, a rural area a ferry-ride away from Vancouver BC. They've participated in FLL for 4 years and won the robot performance award 3 times. In 2006 They won the Director's Award and attended the Atlanta World Festival where they received an award for robot design. Last year the team moved up to FTC, and won the robot design award at the BC tournament.This year the team really enjoyed building with the Tetrix system. They were on the Finalist Alliance and won the Think Award at the BC tournament. They then spent February tweaking their bot. Their hard work paid off in Seattle.
Lunacy Featured in Scientific American
With the national championship robotics competition less than a month away, 66 teams of young engineers have their bots throw down in New York City.
Teams of budding engineers and robotics enthusiasts recently squared off in New York City at the FIRST (For Inspiration, Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics "Lunacy" Competition, pitting their robots against one another in the hope of becoming one of 344 teams to move on to the championship round next month in Atlanta. (The nickname Lunacy is a nod to the 40th anniversary of NASA's moon landing.)
