The FIRST Robotics Competition continues today at Georgian College's Barrie campus with teams vying to be the best at the massive annual tournament.
The annual event sees over 5,000 teams worldwide tasked with creating robots constructed and programmed by high school students.
Locally, there are 26 teams at Georgian competing in a game that looks more like basketball played by robots.
Amara D’Souza, who attends Bishop Macdonell Catholic School in Guelph, told BarrieToday that her team met some unfortunate circumstances in a loss on Saturday.
“We were forced into a defensive mode in our last match and, unfortunately, were not able to pull out a victory,” said D’Souza. “Two of our robots were kind of out of commission, so we’ll regroup and see where we go to next.”
The object of the game is to shoot big orange balls into the holes on what looks like a cargo ship from a rocket. There are discs that are needed to be put in place as well and if you complete all the stages of the game you get points, helping your team win the game.
All of this, of course, must be done by controlling your robot from outside the play area.
Andrew Bronee, who is with the Cyber Gnomes Robotics team from Clearview Township, said the competition is a great way to help kids learn to finish tasks, make quick decisions and work together in a group.
“We only have 10 members, so we’re a fairly small team, but other teams have about 30 people,” Bronee said. “The competition is huge worldwide, but at this level especially it is great to see how everyone jumps in to help fix a problem if the robot malfunctions or even how to make it better.”
The event has been going all weekend with the championship being decided today.
Admission is free and people are encouraged to come out and cheer along with the close to 1,000 spectators expected to have taken in the weekend.
