The Burnaby school district’s only competitive robotics team hosted the VEX Robotics B.C. Provincial Championships last month and earned a spot in the semifinal.
Forty robotics teams from across the province descended on Alpha Secondary Feb. 21 and put their robots through the paces, stacking and pushing plastic cubes and cones for points.
Each year, teams of students design, build and program new robots and compete in a game-based engineering challenge announced at the previous years’ world championships.
This is Alpha’s first full year of competition, and tech teacher Russell Evanisky said VEX organizers approached him to host the provincial championships.
“What they were trying to do was kind of re-energize robotics in Burnaby because we were kind of a dead zone,” he said.
AlphaRobotics, which includes two sub-teams and two robots, earned a spot at the provincials after competing at four events this year.
The educational benefits for student competitors is “huge,” according to Evanisky.
He said students have put about 200 hours into redesigning and improving one of his team’s robots this year.
“Basically, it’s an engineering course in a club,” he said.
AlphaRobotics – with members Daniel Carlin, Leonardo Peronace, Patrick Reddy, Jordan Fung, Thomas Long, Austin Singh, Aidan Guld, Ilias Karimalis and Graham Perry – competes again this Saturday at BCIT for the VEX Pacific North West Regional Championships.
