Morris School robotics team competing in U.S.
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The Morris School robotics team is heading to the U.S. with big dreams and even bigger robots.
Two teams of four will compete against 60 other teams from across Canada and the U.S. in Minnesota on Jan. 25 in the Red River Valley VEX V5 Robotics Competition.
“We’ve been very excited to do this. We’re the only teams in Manitoba right now and there are no other competitions in Manitoba so we have to go the U.S. if we want to compete for this type of robot,” said robotics teacher J.P. Jamieson.
The team just came off a win in November at the 2024 Fisher Robotics VEX V5 Robotics High Stakes competition in Minnesota where they won the Judges Award for sportsmanlike behaviour.
The robotics team at Morris School was only formed in 2023 where they competed in SUMO-style robotics, where the robots scoop and push their competitors out of a ring in order to get points and win a match. In 2024, the team received on loan larger, more complex VEX robots from the Manitoba Association of Educational Technology Leaders (MAETL).
MAETL has a STEM lending library to encourage science, technology, engineering, and math and they lend out different equipment to schools across the province to achieve this. MAETL has donated two $1,600 robots and a 12-foot x 12-foot ring for the students to build and practice with before the school commits to buying its own equipment.
The VEX robots have to accomplish multiple tasks such as picking up rings and placing them on a stake, climbing a four-foot high ladder, and pushing their opponents. Each task has a set of points and the team with the most number of points wins the tournament.
“The top robots of the world can do all three,” said Jamieson. “But it’s that learning process, on do you spend a month working on one task and then move on to the other task? So, you try different strategies to get different points within the time limits. And you also have to be aware that your opponents are not going to let you do it sometimes.”
“Everything that they are learning with it just takes more time and more practice and more testing,” he noted.
Morris School created its own robotics class in 2024 with approval from the province and there is no curriculum set for such a class in the province.
Each student specializes in what they do with the robot such as working with the 3D printer, writing in the engineering journals, building the robot, and driving the robot.
“You can see there’s a lot of different ways that they can get involved and nobody has to be good at everything, but you want that team where they can pull together,” said Jamieson.
Kayden Grattan, who joined to build the mini-SUMO robots, considers the VEX robots a step up.
“Building was still a little challenging with the smaller ones, but on a larger scale like this it gets a lot more challenging, and there’s a lot more problems to deal with, and it includes a lot more problem solving. I prefer the VEX robots because now I’m used to them, it’s a lot nicer, and it’s nice to have a wireless controller rather than (being) tethered – it gets tangled up.”
With the VEX robots, students learn coding as one part of the tournament the robots are autonomous and rely on computer code to complete tasks.
“I’m slightly nervous but mostly excited (about the upcoming tournament). I’m very competitive so I see it mostly as a learning opportunity,” said Carter Evenson.
