April 17-19th was the World Festival in Atlanta, Georgia for all the FIRST Programs.

Canadian excitement started on the Thursday morning during opening ceremonies when Mark Breadner, Vice Principal in the Toronto District School Board and the man behind FIRST Robotics in Canada, was awarded the prestigious Woodie Flowers Award.  The Woodie Flowers Award honours an outstanding engineer or teacher participating in the competition who best demonstrates teaching excellence in science, math and creative design.  This is a student-nominated award and the winner must have won a Woodie Flowers Regional Award to be considered for the International Award.  The International Award is decided by the former World Woodie Flowers Award Winners based on the essays written by students.  Mark is the 13th Woodie Flowers Award recipient.

Excitement continued on all 4 Fields:  we had 4 teams on the Archimedes field, 3 teams on the Newton field, 2 on the Galileo field and 1 on the Curie field. Both 1114 and 1503 were Alliance Captains on Galileo and 2056 was an Alliance Captain on Newton.  Appleby College was selected to the number 1 seed Alliance on Archimedes.

Only 14% of teams make it to the elimination matches.  It is tremendous that 40% of the Canadian FRC teams advanced to that level.

Team 1114 and their Alliance of team 217 "The Thunder Chickens"  from Michigan and team 148 "Robowranglers" from Texas deftly won the Galileo Field Championship.  Then they moved on to the Einstien Field. In the semi-finals on that field against the Champions from the Newton Field:Teams 60, 233, 968.  The team 1114 Alliance lost to some strong defensive play in the first game.  However, they were able to rally and re-think their strategy so that they won the next 2 games in the match and advanced to the finals against the Curie Field Alliance Teams 16, 67, 348 .

Team 1114 has been a strong contender for several years and many of us believe that they were the strongest team in the field in those years.  It is wonderful for them and for all of Canada that their strength in organization and design is recognized by this accomplishment this year.  Congratulations Simbotics and also to the 9 other Canadian teams that competed in the World's/

In addition to the FRC teams, Canada also had 7 FTC teams and % FLL teams in the competition.  Six of the seven FTC teams made it into the elimination matches.  Team SCS Penquins from St. Clements School in Toronto was awarded the 2nd place Teamwork Award and was one of 12 teams posting perfect FLL Scores of 400.  Samantha Tan of York Mills C. I. was presented with the Young Adult Mentor Award for her work with SCS Penquins.

Canadian Teams at Atlanta were: