The Canadian Robotics Competition (CRC) is an annual event open to high schools and CEGEPS in the greater Montreal region. It is a multi-disciplinary event with the objective of building a robot, themed kiosk, website and short video.  This year, the competition ran for two days from Feb 25th to 27th and was hosted at College Montmorency. This represents the sixth consecutive year Dawson has participated in CRC.  Our team did exceptionally well this year making it to the finals and placing 4th! This was a difficult task considering the competition objectives: to design a robot capable of extracting a foam noodle from a holding post, move to another section of the playing field, and place it into a series of stacked tubes in order to accumulate points.  Dawson was up against 27 other CEGEP’s and high schools, some of which were unable to even get their robot to work…  Malfunction were abound, tensions were high, but the atmosphere was one of healthy competitiveness and sportsmanship.

Besides taking 4th place in the robot competition, Dawson also received merit plaques for: Sportsmanship, Journalism, Outstanding Participation,, and Best in Class Robot Construction.

What made the difference this year was a closely knit group of student who truly collaborated bringing the project together. Students worked together from various programs including:

• Pure and Applied – Robot and control programming
• Civil tech—Project management and robot construction
• Computer Sciences – Website development and Robot construction
• Mechanical tech – Robot Construction and kiosk construction