Written by Zsofia Hatvani, Student Journalist
St. Theresa’s Catholic High School in Midland provides a variety of clubs and extracurricular activities. Student participation is encouraged for all sorts of teams varying from sports to the sciences to cooking and nutrition and the school offers lots of opportunities for learning experiences outside of a typical day.
The St. Theresa’s Thunder Robotics Team is a group of 12 students that have been working together to design, construct, program and operate a robot to compete in several competitions being held from November through February. The Robotics club allows students with an interest in technology and programming to acquire hands on experience with robots, and collaborate as a team to create a robot to perform in the competitions. “I had an interest in technology and programming and I took all of the courses - I am planning to go into computer sciences after high school,” said Owen M., a Grade 12 member of the team. Thunder Robotics has been meeting at least three times a week since October, preparing their robot.
The team won the St. Catharines Provincial Qualifier on January 20th and the team members and coaches celebrated their success. The team is currently ranked 389th out of over 11,500 teams world wide in the Skills Challenge.
Thunder Robotics is currently preparing to return to St. Catharines for the Provincial Championships on February 24th. The VEX Robotics competition, presented by the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation, is the world’s largest elementary and high school robotics competition. It is the annual gathering of aspiring programmers and tech-students from 45 different countries, all competing to become the next World Champions.
Each year, a new engineering challenge is presented as a game that must be performed by the robot each team designs. This year, the VEX Competition is called “In the Zone”. It is played on a 12 by 12 foot caged square field. Two alliances, red and blue, are each composed of two teams. The objective is to achieve a higher score than each team’s alliance. Points are scored by stacking the yellow cones on the goal cones, having the highest stack and by scoring Mobile Goals and Parking Robots. There are eighty cones that can be stacked on ten goals, five per alliance. The teams compete in 15 second matches autonomously, followed by 1 minute and 45 seconds of driver-controlled play.
St. Theresa’s wishes the Thunder Robotics Team luck in the upcoming Provincial Championships in St. Catharines.