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Banting robotics team heading to Germany for international event

December 5, 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart

Several members of the Banting Memorial High School Robotics Team will be travelling to an international robotics event in Hanover, Germany during the first week of April next year. Coming with them is a robot goalie they plan to exhibit.

The Hanover Messe (German for fair), combines mechanical and electrical engineering with computer science to open up new horizons with robot technology.

The Robotics Club at Banting is a thriving and popular club where teachers and students work together on projects. Some of the projects are self-directed while others come in the form of a challenge where they can go up against other schools with the same challenge.

When the team travels to Germany, they will be taking their robot goalie with them. The robot goalie is designed to stop hockey pucks using a high-tech design and cameras that can read the trajectory of a puck flying toward it.

The high school’s robotics club was started in 2019 and quickly became popular among students who have an interest in science and robots in particular. They prefer to be known as a team rather than a club because everyone contributes in different ways to the projects they build.

“Our main focus is something called First Robotics,” explained Banting faculty member Bryan Haas, who leads the club. “First Robotics has a big competition every year. Every year there’s a new competition and we don’t know what it is until the first Saturday in January. They are high school competitions but usually they are held at bigger venues like universities. We built a dancing robot three years ago.”

The dancing robot came about when a film director was so impressed with the school’s work, that he asked if they could build a robot for a film.

“They asked if we could build a dancing robot that looked like an alien from another planet, and I said ‘sure,’” Mr. Hass explained. “The next week TSN called and asked if we could build a robot goalie. They thought it was so awesome they asked us to bring it into the studio live, and they’ll have a show where people shoot on it. We were live on TSN with the goalie. The robot has a camera and could see the puck and made saves on its own,” Mr. Haas said, adding, “We have 10 students and four mentors going to Hanover. I’ve got some of the smartest kids in the school here,”

The kids in the robotics club all have an interest in robotics in some way. Some design, some do the actual mechanics and assembly, and others do the coding for the robot to operate.

Several students lead the different divisions.

The robotics room at the high school is a busy place as all the students work on their assignments and focus on the task at hand.

Grade 12 student Ian Rennie is one of the leaders and said he hopes his experience on the robotics team will help him in pursuing a career in computer science.

“Mr. Haas suggested I join the club and said it would be something that would help me out in the future with computers and technology because I want to go into computer science,” Ian said. “It will teach me more about the field and help me make connections and help with any jobs I might want in the future. I checked it out, and in Grade 10 I spent time on the team. As you get older you spend more time on the team. It’s a big learning curve. This year we have the Grade 9s doing small robots and we’ve got Grades 10 and 11 building flat robots which are really simple so they have their own competition. We’ve got Grade 12s and some Grade 11s building the goalie robot.”

Ian is a member of the team that will be going to Germany.

Grade 10 student, Vienna Wilson, joined the Robotics Club after taking Mr. Haas’ computer tech course last year and he suggested the Club might be something she would enjoy.

“I decided to try something new and I fell in love with it,” Vienna explained. “There’s a lot of creative freedom. You can pretty much build anything out of any material and there’s really no limits. Right now I’m building the Germany robot and I do a lot of the building on the inside.”

Vienna will be travelling to Germany as part of the team.

“I’m looking forward to representing Canada on such a large scale, and getting the opportunity to go to Germany and do this at a giant trade show – and being the only high school team, I’d say that’s a real reward,” Vienna said. “I do see this in my future now that I’m getting more involved in the robotics side of things. I’m seeing this as an opportunity to go into something in the future.”

Several parents who have related skills are involved with the robotics team to lend advice and professional experience. Some former students who were part of the team when they were in high school, also returned to help with the projects.

The Banting robot goalie has already impressed a lot of people here and will certainly leave a big impression on the thousands of people who will be attending the show in Germany.  

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