“Robotics has no secrets for us! "

Ten students from 3^e elementary cycle of Saint-Gérard school, in Montreal, will represent Quebec in their category at the World Robotics Festival First Championship, from April 23 to 26 in Missouri.

For a second consecutive year, teachers Pierre Gagnon and Guillaume Joly, of the'Saint-Gérard primary school in Montreal (CSDM), motivated ten 5th grade students to dive into this crazy project, whose theme this year was, for 9-14 year olds, Nature's Fury ("Nature in fury"). Within this challenge, they had to achieve 3 things:

1. Program an NXT Mindstorms robot to make it accomplish missions and collect as many points as possible. They then had to pass in front of three groups of judges to explain their approach and the problems they encountered.

2. Identify a community that could experience a natural disaster and create an innovative solution to help them. This solution could help the community to prepare, react, or rebuild.

3. Achieve a challenge affecting the values of First, or sharing, collaboration, listening and dynamism.

These students were able to present their achievements to the  Robotics Festival, which took place from March 20 to 22, 2014 at the Uniprix Stadium in Montreal. On this occasion, Radio-Canada made a short video reportage of on the subject.

All this work has paid off, as the Saint-Gérard school team emerged as a big winner in its category. It will be the only elementary team to represent 9-14 year olds from Quebec at the First Championship World Festival which will take place April 23-26 in St. Louis, Missouri.

Pierre Gagnon does not hide his joy at this result. “The whole community of Saint-Gérard is thrilled by this news,” he says. We are really proud of what our students have succeeded in doing! They really worked hard. But it is not finished! We intend to represent Quebec as it should! "He also wishes to thank the organization Youth Fusion, which allows young people to have such experiences.

Well done to the winning team!

The Robotics Festival is also a challenge for 14-18 year olds and no less than six secondary schools from Quebec will be represented at the international final in Missouri. These are the three champion teams of the competition, those from Collège Régina-Assumpta (Montreal), École secondaire de la Montée (Sherbrooke) and École secondaire La Courvilloise (Beauport), as well as teams from the Collège Saint-Bernard (Drummondville), the Séminaire de Sherbrooke (Sherbrooke) and the École secondaire Saint-Henri (Montreal).

We wish them all good luck for the future!

It was in 1998 that the First Lego League through Dean kamen, inventor and founder of First, and Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, from the Lego company. This alliance between First and Lego aimed to set up a program to introduce young people to the fun of science and technology. This program revolves around robotics, programming and problem solving. Today, it has grown worldwide with 20,000 teams in 70 countries. In Quebec, it is supported by Robotics First Quebec. You can find out more by attaching your Facebook group.