Winnipeg students strive to be best of the BEST

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This article was published 21/10/2014 (4330 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sisler High School students are headed for a battle of the bots.

The North Wind Robotics team, consisting of 26 Sisler students in Grades 10 to 12, is set to compete in the Bison BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology) Robotics competition, which takes place on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 in Fargo, N.D.

The BEST competition is composed of an obstacle course in which teams must navigate their robot through a series of specific tasks.  On Sept. 20, selected members of the North Wind team travelled to Fargo for the competition’s kick-off event, where the playing field and game rules were presented and robot-creating kits were distributed.

“The obstacles are a blocked bridge, where the robot has to get a permit to open it (by pressing a button) and then has to travel on that elevated bridge,” said North Wind team member Anmol Mann.

“There’s also a bad, bumpy road, so the robot has to be able to travel on top of that. It also has to carry wind turbine components from one area to another and assemble those and it has to be able to carry that amount of weight.”

An Iron Chef-like scenario, teams are given a specific parts list, some of which are supplied by BEST and some of which they must obtain.

“We’re given a kit and we can only use the items in that kit, which makes it even more difficult,” said Crystal Lachance, head of the industrial arts and home economics department at Sisler.

“They (the students) have ideas, but not always the proper material to make it work, so they have to improvise.”

Sisler is one of 22 schools competing in Bison BEST and is the only Canadian team in the competition. The top teams from Bison BEST will advance to the Northern Plains BEST regional championship, which takes place Dec. 4 to 6 in Fargo.

In addition to building a functioning machine, the students must work as a team, with each student assigned a specific role. Jobs include design, construction and programming, but also keeping an engineering notebook and raising funds.

“It’s exposure to a real life business model, where a person has to work as part of a team and has a role to play and they need to be aware of the role,” said Steve Erickson, a mathematics teacher at Sisler.

“There’s a huge team aspect to it,” said Lorne Richards, head of the science department at Sisler. “They have to do some really high level problem solving. It’s neat to watch the kids work to come up with solutions to problems that they’re identifying themselves.”