Most of the students in the robotics class at Howe Sound Secondary were more than a dozen years away from being born when the 1986 movie Short Circuit hit the big screen and embedded in a generation’s consciousness.
And yet it was hard not to think of the film – about a military robot that develops human intelligence, comes to life and escapes – when entering the shop-class-turned-robotics-room at Howe Sound, as knee-high machines zoomed around seemingly on their own.
This is the first year at the Squamish high school for the project-based class that uses VEX Robotics Design Systems to introduce robotics to students in Grades 10 and 11.
Exposing students to the challenge and fun of robotics is just what teacher Jamie Leslie hoped for when he started the class in September.
“I have done robotics in my other school districts for years, so they kind of wanted to modernize things here a bit so I decided to carry on,” said Leslie, while making the rounds to have a look at what each small cluster of students was working on last Thursday afternoon.
Students were busy preparing their robots for an inter-class competition.
Grade 11 student Jonny Williams said he was the last person his friends would have predicted would take a robotics course. He’s usually more of a jock, he said, devoting himself to soccer and snowboarding, but decided to try his hand in Leslie’s class.
“I have never really been into this kind of thing,” Williams said, “but it’s fun.”
When he finishes high school, Williams said he planned to go into political science in post-secondary school or maybe work to become an English teacher, but exposure to robotics has made him wonder if there might also be another option.
“I went to UBC and they had a program, like for this, and that would also be pretty cool,” he said, while using a remote control to make the scooper on his robot tip a classroom stool.
Student Ryder French said he likes the class because he gets to solve problems. “It is taking all the parts and turning the individual pieces into something great. It is kind of metaphorically resonant, I guess,” he said. “It is taking stuff – bits and pieces – and then making them into a whole.”
For Genevieve Wick, who is in Grade 10, the robotics class is a chance to gain experience related to the science fields she is considering once she graduates.
“Anything ‘sciencey’ at this point really,” she said of her plans after graduation. “Robotics is a really cool field.”
Wick said she was always interested in experimenting and figuring out how things work, so the class is a chance to do what she enjoys.
“I have a lot of weird science projects [at home],” she said, adding that growing up she would make vinegar “fizz all over my house.”
At the beginning of this month, five members of the class went to the 2015 VEX Robotics Championships at British Columbia Institute of Technology in Burnaby.
The students came in the top 30 out of about 100 teams from high schools all across North America, but most importantly they learned what they need to do to do even better at the upcoming April 2015 BCIT Engineering Challenge – Skills Canada BC provincial competition in Abbotsford.
“The type of robot we made was very different from the type of robot other people made,” said Andrew Johnston, who was one of the students who went to the Burnaby competition. “Other people made a scissor-lift type of thing, whereas we just had two claws.”
Johnston said he and his competition mates would be much more prepared this time, and the type of robots they would make would improve year over year.
The way these teens are going, maybe one day one of their robots will resemble the futuristic Number 5, the robot in Short Circuit.
