Vanier College Robotics Club Gives me Hope

I tend to keep the college at which I teach and this blog on which I write as separate entities, as there is no actual affiliation between the two.  But I am a mentor for the Vanier Robotics Club "Build Team", and today, I really want to praise them and the entire Vanier Robotics Club for their accomplishments over the past four months.  I urge adults who fear that today's youth have become lethargic to read on.

Vanier College hosted Profuga 2012, the 11th edition of the CRC Robotics competition, inside its Sports Complex over the past three days (Thursday, Feb 16 to Saturday, Feb 18).  The annual provincial competition is run by a company called CRC Robotics.  On their website, they describe themselves and the competition as follows:

"CRC Robotics is a non-profit organization offering high-school and CÉGEP students a quality multidisciplinary competition in an entertaining, high-intensity environment to counter school dropout rates by inspiring tomorrow's leaders. Students are challenged to build a robot and to produce a video, web site, and kiosk presentation, where all tasks are entirely student-run."

This year's robotics challenge was ultimately a series of two-on-two capture the flag heats, where schools alternate who they compete against as well as alongside.  The terrain on which the robots did battle had ramped surfaces.  Designing a robot that can not only manipulate objects, but do so while translating up or down a 20 degree incline is no easy task.  However, the tech-savvy students composing the Vanier Build Team and those of tens of other schools were up to it.

It may surprise you to learn that the goal in this competition was not to chop other robots to bits with buzz saws or axes (I must admit that this was the particular image I used to associate with robotics competitions). But there are a couple of reasons why, in my view, a relay-race or capture the flag is a much better choice than a battle to the death for this particular competition:

(1) The event is longer when robots don't get sawed in half.
(2) Canada in general (and the province of Quebec in particular) has a fairly pacifist mindset.