Lego Robotics tournament hosted at Nobleton Senior Public School
By Jon Yaneff

Nobleton students Justin Pazzack (Grade 5), Michael Bordignon (Grade 8) and Owen Dubar (Grade 8) look on as their robot completed the cleanup challenge. Photo by Jon Yaneff

Nobleton Senior Public School hosted the York Region District School Board's Lego Robotics tournament for the fifth straight year recently.

Grade 4 to 8 students built robots to compete in two challenges: cleanup and penny. During the cleanup challenge the robots had to perform every day tasks, such as cleaning the house and turning off light switches. The team to perform the task the quickest won the competition. The penny challenge had the robots compete one-on-one against each other to collect the most pennies and put them in a bank.

"The design of the robot and the task have to be integrated, which means the tasks have to be programmed into the computer then sent to the brain of the robot," said assistant organizer Pat Stephens.

The Nobleton intermediate Grade 8 team of Matt Baker, Michael Bordignon, Owen Dubar and Dennis Orr came in first place in the cleanup and penny challenge. The intermediate quartet also won for Most Innovative Design.

In the junior division, the Nobleton Grade 6 team of Josh Hollings, Alan Marchment, Neil Orr and Sebastian Richter won first for Best Mechanical Design. The Grade 4 team of Jake Hilliard, Michael Larusso, Andrew McKee and Jake Parkinson placed first in the Most Innovative Design category.

"The students work on the robots for about two months and when they are finished, this tournament is held," said former Nobleton student and robotics volunteer Drew Middleton.

Middleton, a Grade 10 student at King City Secondary School, helps the students with their robots, along with his mother Sharon and his brother Blair. The Middleton family has been an intricate part of the robotics tournament since its inception six years ago. Blair, who is a Grade 12 student at KCSS, plans on going to university to study engineering.

"I think this tournament played a big part in his path towards wanting to become an engineer," said event organizer John Tovey. "It is also a great learning experience where the kids have the opportunity to be involved in this school that is non-athletic, as well as learn team building."

Besides Nobleton, which had five junior division teams compete in the tournament and three intermediate division teams, there were seven other schools compete in the tournament. They included Central Park PS, Northern Lights PS, Orchard Park PS, William Berczy PS, Fieldcrest PS, Thornhill PS and Hartman PS. Overall, there were 27 teams in the tournament.

William Berczy won for Best Mechanical Design, Orchard Park placed first for the cleanup challenge junior division and Northern Lights was first for the penny challenge junior division.

Some of the events sponsors included Alpine Graphic Productions Ltd., 3M, Scotchprint Graphics and Matched Component System. Henkel was the proud sponsor of technology at Nobleton, which provided some of the computers for the tournament.

LEGO NXT Mindstorms are the new generation of LEGO robots. Schools either compete with NXT of LEGO RCX. Spectrum has been the supplier of LEGO education for the last four years and most teams competing in the robotics tournament purchased their LEGO from Spectrum.