On Wednesday, February 16 2011, students from the Faculty of Engineering, together with high school students from St. David Catholic Secondary School started testing their newly developed robot in E5. Their robot, nicknamed ‘the Hoff’, will be competing at this year’s FIRST Robotics Competition to be held on March 24-26, 2011 at the University of Waterloo. The team has been designing and building their robot for this year’s FIRST challenge since January 2nd.
With the opening of the Faculty of Engineering Student Design Centre (SDC) in E5, the possible links between high schools and the University Of Waterloo (UW) have increased dramatically.
So when St. David Catholic Secondary School started their rookie FIRST© Robotics Competition (FRC) team 3683 named “Dave”, they automatically looked for current and alumni student mentors from the Faculty of Engineering, as well as for a connection with the Student Design Centre.
St. David’s FRC team is currently the only team in the City of Waterloo and they have 7 mentors who are enrolled in Engineering at the University of Waterloo, as well as 3 alumni from Engineering. Even the teacher at St. David, Alex Matan, is an alumnus from the University of Waterloo! The robot is being built by students from St. David together with their mentors from UW, the high school and local companies, such as Aeryon.
One of the issues the team had initially was space for testing the robot on a playing field. After a meeting with Peter Teerstra Ph.D., P.Eng., Director of the Student Design Center, it was decided to use the open area in the Student Design Centre as the solution.
Although only part of the robot was working, on Friday February 18, the robot was shown to St. Matthew, a local Elementary School. This sparked a lot of interest in the students for Science and Engineering.
On February 21 (Family Day) Team Dave invited other FRC teams over to play a scrimmage on the playing field in E5. Team 2609 from Guelph (http://www.lourdeschs.com/crusader/), Team 3161 from Oakville (http://www.htrobotics.ca/) and our own team 3683 (http://www.teamdave.ca) shared experiences, tips and lots of encouragement during that day.
The next day, Tuesday February 22, was the last day of the build season and at 11:59PM the robot was sealed in a bag until March 24th. In the meantime, our team will continue to tinker with ideas and small improvements that could be added on the day of the competition.
For more information on FIRST Robotics Competition visit their website at http://www.firstroboticscanada.org
For information about team “Dave” 3683, visit http://www.TeamDave.ca
Credit for the photos is Philip Wang
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