The road to Brazil is paved with robots for two area high school students.
Jayden Leister, 17, and Bo Chiasson, 15, will be travelling to Sao Paulo to compete in the WorldSkills America Competition from November 11 to 19.
The boys were part of a larger team-which included Yorkton Regional High School schoolmates Taylor Pachal and Rachael Machnee-that won the Skills Canada National Competition last spring in Edmonton. Only two could go to Brazil, however.
"There is a lot of high level math involved in this and I am glad both boys have a real aptitude for math," said Kevin Chiasson, YRHS robotics team coach and Bo's dad.
"I've always been inclined to maths and sciences and problem-solving," said Jayden. "This just puts it all together."
Getting to nationals, much less winning, was no mean feat. Just getting out of Yorkton was a challenge in itself. The robotics club at the high school, started by Kevin, Jayden and two former YRHS students in 2009, has become so popular it had to hold its own competition to determine who would go to provincials in Regina.
Six four-person teams competed for three spots in the Saskatchewan competition.
The Skills Canada 2012 challenge involved building a remote-controlled robot that would pick up four-inch square blocks and place them on a three-tier trolley in a defined playing area.
The three Yorkton teams competed against high schools from all over the province with Jayden, Bo, Taylor and Rachael coming out on top without a loss in the final round.
For the WorldSkills competition, the boys have to program a German-built bot called Robotino to complete a spatial test involving pucks and colours. They worked with experts from Ontario and Germany via Skype over the summer and have taught Robotino to complete the task.
The robot must find and trap three pucks in sequence, based on their colours, and place them in corresponding colour spaces at the other end of an enclosed area.
Jayden and Bo are currently refining the programming for efficiency, accuracy and speed, as the competition will be won by the best time.
And they are fairly confident about their chances in Brazil.
"It's looking alright, right now," said Bo. "We have a lot more practice we can put in, but it's looking good so far."
And they appear to be very focussed.
"We're more excited about the competition," said Jayden. "We really want to do well there, so, maybe not so much the travelling, but the competition."
Despite their facility with robotics, neither youth has decided yet to pursue it as a career.
"I know I definitely want to do some form of engineering, but there's still a lot up in the air," Jayden said.
"I'm not really sure right now," said Bo. "This will just help me find out what I really want to do."
Skills Canada runs provincial and national championships every year in dozens of trades from aircraft maintenance to gardening.
