Sherwood Park teens headed to international VEX robotics competition

EDMONTON — A group of Edmonton-area students are vying to be the best teenage VEX robot makers in the world. A team of six students from Archbishop Jordan Catholic High School in Sherwood Park competed against 36 other teams from Alberta and Saskatchewan at the Alberta Provincial VEX Championship earlier this month at NAIT.

The VEX system is used at the school to teach computer science robotic engineering, and is a robotics platform designed to make robots. In competition, teams score points by navigating their robots through the course and completing specific tasks. It’s no easy feat.

“The students have put in hundreds, if not thousands of hours into doing this,” said Archbishop Jordan computer science teacher Scott Crosbie. “We start them at the grade 9 level using a different robotics system and then we eventually segue them into the much larger VEX robots, but it’s very difficult.”

The robots are checked before competition to make sure they’re built according to certain guidelines.

“They have a list of about 25 different points that you have to satisfy before they’ll actually let you compete.

“So the robots can’t be whatever you want, you actually have to engineer them within certain constraints,” said Crosbie.

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "So the robots can't be whatever you want, you actually have to engineer them within certain constraints," said Crosbie.

Archbishop Jordan put forth four teams to the provincial championship. One of them, team “Jaguar”, along with two teams from a Calgary high school, qualified for the world championship. It will take place in Louisville, Kentucky from April 15 to 18.

“That competition is 450 teams from around the world at the high school level, from about 25 different countries, who basically go and compete in this game here to see who is the best,” said Crosbie, gesturing to a complex obstacle course on the floor.

Team “Jaguar”, as well Crosbie, are now preparing for the world stage. Crosbie said the competition at NAIT exposed the group to the flaws of its original robot design, and said the competing students have a large task ahead of them.

“If we win or lose, it doesn’t matter because it’s such an experience to work with a team to be able to problem-solve,” said student Evan Ogonoski.

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "If we win or lose, it doesn't matter because it's such an experience to work with a team to be able to problem-solve," said student Evan Ogonoski.

“If things get thrown our way that we’re going to have struggles with, it’s important that we learn and grow from this experience as well,” he added.