Saturday was a huge day for Ridley’s robotics program. We competed at the Holy Cross Vex robotics tournament along with 38 teams from Ontario (as far away as Ottawa) and one team from Bermuda. We had four teams at the contest, team 1509 (William Wang, Anakin Li, Raymond Gao, Dane Sisinni, Sunshine Wang, Henry Wang), 1509R (William van Sittert, Dan Marcos and James Gross), 1509Z (Jonah Rubin, Ming Zhang, Adam Roulston) and 1509E (Javan Graham, Luca de Leonardis , Nina Haag and Ryan Schmidt).
Team 1509 was a new design with a new driver and programmer and we hoped for a few wins. They finished the day with a 4-3 record in the round robin tournament, losing to team 1509E in the semi-finals. Teams 1509R and 1509Z had identical records of 5-2 and finished 7th and 8th out of 38. Team 1509R lost to the eventual runner-up team in the semi-finals and team 1509Z was beaten in the other semi-final by our own 1509E team. Team 1509E was the only team at the tournament who went undefeated but had a huge battle in the finals against team 3560Z from Brampton, winning the best two out of three finals in the last few seconds with a brilliant driving move by Ryan Schmidt. Our team 1509E was the tournament champion!
Throughout the day, the one feature that set our teams apart was the programming prowess of all our teams from programmers Javan Graham, Dane Sisinni, Sunshine Wang, Jonah Rubin and Daniel Marcos. In a separate portion of the contest, Ryan Schmidt finished 2nd in the driver skills one-minute challenge. Javan’s programming skills one-minute challenge run’s score of 49 was tied for the second best this year in Canada and currently has his team ranked 14th in the world (out of approximately 8000 teams)!! Daniel Marcos also had an excellent programming skills run and he is currently 55th in the world. Overall, it was another huge success for our team, especially considering how many rookies we brought on board this year and the junior level of many of the team members. Coach McCambley and I are very pleased with their efforts.
Our next big event is the Ontario championships on March 1st with another tournament for our R and Z machines the week prior to that one. Go team 1509 go!
As told by Mr. Reimer
Good morning Rodney! After reading this article I had a chuckle because of a conversation my son and I had (a few days ago) regarding how good other schools were concerning robotics. He had expressed his doubts on the strength of Ridley and whether they had won anything in the last little while! Well……………I will just have to print and glue this article to his forehead!
Congrats , good luck and a great outcome. See you around campus….Edward
Congratulations to the Ridley Robotics Program! Where will the Ontario championships on March 1st be held… Thank you!
Hi, Rebecca
Sorry for the delayed response! The Ontario Championships were held at Governor Simcoe School in St. Catharines. Two of our teams have qualified for the World Robotics Championships in Anaheim, California in April. They will be competing against 400 teams from over 25 countries!