Calgary robotics team heading to world competition in Texas for third straight year

Four members of FTC 10015 Hyper Droid are working out the kinks of their new robot before they head to the world championships in Houston, Texas.

The First Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics team, known as 10015 Hyper Droids, is heading to Houston, Texas, at the end of April for the FTC Robotics World Championship.

The team is made up of eight Calgary students and three mentors.

“There’s right under 9,000 teams in the world and around 300 of them only go to World Championships so it’s a pretty big achievement to do it for three years,” said 14-year-old Mahie Kainth.

“Everyone there is so kind and they help you with whatever you need and it’s really interesting to see, like the other team’s different designs and how they come together.”

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Kainth serves as the team’s secondary robot driver, someone who has to be ready to help the main driver if something breaks on the robot while on the playing field.

This is her third year on the team and her third time heading to worlds.

“I think that I’ve learned a lot of stuff about STEM and especially this year, it’s helped me a lot with science class,” she said. “Because we’re doing a lot of that stuff in science and like most of our classes are revolved around STEM related activities And I think I’ve learned a lot of different skills that I wouldn’t have learned by sitting in a classroom or just for my teacher.”

Adrian Warren, 16 years old, is the team lead and says the Hyper Droids are the highest ranked team in Canada to attend the world event in Houston. This is also his third year competing on the world stage.

“Our first year at worlds, obviously we were completely new to the whole thing so we didn’t do super great, we finished kind of top half of our division and we didn’t get selected for playoffs,” he said.

“Last year we did, we finished 18th out of 64 teams in the division.”

Warren says it’s a real team effort with everyone having their own role to design and build a robot and keep it working throughout the four-day event.

“It’s kind of like F1, you don’t win the race by just starting the race, you have to finish the race as well,” he said.

“So keeping the robot working by replacing stuff if it gets broken or ideally designing it so that it doesn’t get broken in the first place is also a super big part of those competitions.”

Team members who’ve been to the Houston event say while it’s a competition, it’s also a social event where teams share and talk about their machines and learn what they can improve upon from each other.

“This year we realized that we can get better performance and better scores out of our robot by improving it,” said Warren.

“We decided to go for a full rebuild before worlds so we have actually two robots right now and we’re hoping to get the new one programed and ready to go in two weeks.”

Carter Shaw, 17 years old, is in his final year on the team. He says the four years he’s spent with the Hyper Droids has taught him a lot.

“This is a great opportunity for anyone who wants to go into a STEM career because I joined the team cause I wanted to kind of learn a bit about everything,” he said.

“I’ve already been accepted into SAIT’s mechanical engineering technologist program and then I’m going to do the transfer program to get the degree and then I want to go work for a visual effects company in animatronics, preferably at Disney.”

Mike Warren, lead coach says he’s proud of the team making the worlds for three consecutive years.

“I think one of our takeaways from the last two times that we went to worlds was that Alberta has very good potential with lots of interested teams,” he said. “(Increasing) that skill level and some of that competitive level in Alberta can really help all of the teams in Alberta become more competitive.”

Warren says he’s always on the hunt for more students to join the team along with more mentors.

“This is an opportunity for students from Grade 7 to 12 to come and learn technical skills, team building skills and working together with different ages of kids, I personally recruit for passion - if you’re passionate about robots,” he said.

“I’m always looking for more mentors and I would emphasize we’re looking for non-technical mentors as well so it’s not just about programing or just about robots, we have a website design, we have print design, we do engineering portfolios of the year so there’s sort of non-technical opportunities for both students and mentors.”

While the team is fine tuning their robot for the world competition it’s also fundraising to help cover the transportation and hotel costs for the event. Learn more about the Hyper Droids and how to donate here: https://10015.ca/.