Students from across North America compete in ‘Mecha Mayhem’

The BMO Centre in Calgary was alive with action over the weekend as more than 250 teams from across North America competed in Mecha Mayhem.

Preparing over the course of four weeks, teams design, program and build their robot to compete in a specific 2-on-2 style match-up that has teams stacking hoops in various ways.

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Since 2023, teams consisting of middle-school, high-school and university students have been taking part in the competition, which can lead to bigger and better platforms according to Mecha Mayhem organizer Todd Ablett.

“From this one, if you do well enough, you’ve qualified for the world championships,” explained Ablett, “where there will be 1,000 teams in various categories from across the planet.”

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While the competition over the weekend was the main focus, organizations like Alberta Innovates, post secondary institutions and other STEM related companies were all on site to help foster a passion for a future in tech.

“Technical, scientists, engineers, technicians, STEM-related people, there’s all kinds of programming stuff,” Ablett said. “The cool thing is you get to do it competitively.”

This year a team from Archbishop Jordan Catholic School in Sherwood Park dubbed the “Rat Lovers” participated in Mecha Mayhem. Grade 11 student Wayne Clarke told Global News that in order to be successful in a competition like this, it’s important to be flexible.

“This bot was originally intended to be running for skills,” Clarke said. “But we decided because of time constraints that was just not going to be possible, so within the last few weeks we decided to them make it more of a match-winning bot.”

Initially an interest in robotics was what sparked an interest for Clarke and the rest of his team to enroll in the robotics course at their school, but quickly they found it to be more than that.

“Well of course we all took the class,” said Clarke. “We all became really good friends through that, and it’s just been really fun from there.”

While Clarke still has a little over a year to go before he graduates, he intends to go to continue on to become a mechanical engineer.