Competition of First Robotics Quebec: robots designed by high school students

Nadia Lemieux

Thursday, 1 march 2018 20:04

UPDATE
Thursday, 1 march 2018 20:16

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Robots designed by high school students across Quebec will compete Friday and Saturday in order to find the best candidates to represent the province at the international.

First robotics competition, organized in the framework of the Festival of robotics, is in full swing at the Claude-Robillard sports complex. The theme of this year: the video games of the 80’s and 90’s.

The robots, designed in 45 days by teams of students from 14 to 18 years old, will compete in an arcade video game 8 bit staged in giant format. The teams must accumulate the most points possible.

At the end of the competition, which opposes 55 teams, seven of them will fly off to Detroit for the world championship which will be held at the end of April.

Career choice

Ruby Novoa Forcier, age 18, has spent the last two years of his secondary education in the only all-female league of First Robotics Quebec, the Phéminix of the école Marguerite-de-Lajemmerais.

After graduation, she could not prevent it from coming back. She now plays the role of a mentor for adolescent girls of the team.

“In high school, I didn’t know what profession I was going to do,” said the one who has developed a passion for engineering through Robotics competitions First.

She is now studying at the collège de Maisonneuve in electrical engineering: “I had never thought to go in this area here. It is really being in the team that I have found.”

Augustin Kayembe, a fourth secondary school secondary of Anjou, was also left completely to the charm of engineering. “It has given me the taste to do civil engineering and college and university later!”

To overcome the stall

“This is a beautiful introduction to programming, mechanical construction, design by computer, but also in strategy and entrepreneurship,” stressed the regional director of First Robotics Quebec, Martin Régimbald.

In 2012-2013, the dropout rate at the secondary level was 18.8 % in boys and 11.9 % in girls, according to statistics from the ministry of Education. Mr. Régimbald states that the program First can contribute to the fight to stall.

“In boys, an interest in projects that are manual, and the resolution of problems, definitely, it sticks, he added. The young girls, it shows them that they can have access to higher education in science, technology and engineering.”