ROBOT HIGH
Competitions teach students skills they’ll need for tomorrow’s careers
As a child, Mya Desmarais loved a friend’s stories about making robots and showcasing his creations at competitions around the world.
She didn’t really know what robots were, but Desmarais knew she wanted to build them.
“My parents would always joke with him, ‘Hey, can you make a robot that can clean up after our dog?’ and I thought, ‘I want to do stuff like that,’ ” she says.
In Grade 9, Desmarais joined a robotics class at school and this year the Yorkton Regional High School student was the only girl at the Skills Canada Saskatchewan robotics competition.
“My favourite part about the entire experience is seeing all the cool, little things we can do and what other peoples’ robots can do,” the 16-year-old says.
Building robots was long the domain of sophisticated post-secondary types. But now high school students are developing their own robots in places from Yorkton to the tiny northern village of Ile-ala-Crosse.
These young innovators have won prizes in the provincial and national competition and some teams have travelled as far as Sweden, Germany and Brazil to compete.
Yorkton high school robotics teacher Kevin Chiasson accidentally stumbled on to robotics eight years ago. For the carpenter hired to teach electrical skills, the learning curve was steep.
“I had absolutely no idea about robotics,” he confesses.
But he learned.
Dozens of students came out for an after-school robotics club and Chiasson introduced robotics courses in which students started with small robots that are relatively easy to build.
The competitions began with a win in the myRobot Rumble, a provincial student competition at Saskatchewan Polytechnic for students using the popular Parallax SumoBot building kits.
“In the past five years we have won five out of eight myRobot competitions and been to the nationals five times, winning four golds and a bronze,” Chiasson says.
In 2012, the school’s win in a national competition qualified the Yorkton students for world competition.
“In November of that year we went to Sao Paulo, Brazil, for World Skills Americas,” Chiasson says. “The students actually won the event.”
Was he surprised at the success? “Oh, heck yeah. At that point, we were still in our infancy as a club. We didn’t expect to win provincials, let alone the nationals, and to carry forth at international competition. We are a high school competing against post-secondary institutions at an international level.”
Chiasson’s students excel because they are, shall we say, wired to want to learn.
“If you came into the club or my classes — you don’t find students sitting in the corner goofing off,” he says. “They are engaged.”
Beyond building machines, students glean important life lessons and skills relevant in the real world.
“This is not just a Lone Ranger kind of endeavour. Everything we do is in teams,” Chiasson says.
“Almost every day in the news there is something new about robotics. This is where the students are going to be employed ... maintaining, creating and programming them. It could be home electrical, it could be in industry or even the shop down the road. These are skills that are going to be applicable to good jobs in the future.”
Pam Schwann, president of the Saskatchewan Mining Association president agrees that it is very valuable for students to dip into the robotics realm. To support that pursuit, the association sponsors a number of high school robotics teams.
She says robots are used extensively in the industry today and likely will play an increasingly large role in mines and other workplaces.
“So, they are preparing themselves for future careers, not just in mining,” Schwann says. “We are early adopters of technology. We really encourage that participation by students and students becoming familiar with how robotics work and how they look in the workforce.”
More early adoption is taking place on the northwestern shore of Lac Ile-a-la-Crosse, where math and science teacher Dave Dalton admits he knew “absolutely nothing” about robotics before teaching it.
“They might not do it right, right away, and might mess it up and have to start over, but that’s the way life is,” Dalton says from Rossignol High School in Ile-a-la-Crosse. “I firmly believe anyone can pick up a robotics kit and succeed.”
That’s exactly what happened
They might not do it right, right away, and might mess it up and have to start over, but that’s the way life is.
when Dalton and his students tackled a Parallax SumoBot project.
“The kit comes with a fairly standard base model you have to build, with a metal frame, programming board, a couple of little servo motors and a whole bunch of wires,” he says.
“We had no idea what we were doing, but had an instruction sheet. I kind of learned alongside the kids.”
The initial goal was to have “robots that moved,” but soon students were building bigger ones for Skills Canada competitions.
Dalton says lessons offered by robotics go beyond basic building to everything from problem solving to creativity, while competitions offer camaraderie and lessons from other students.
“Some of these kids start off really shy and then they get involved and open up and become an entirely different person,” Dalton says.