The WCHS Robotics Club Goes to Worlds!

Throughout the 2024-2025 season, Western Canada High School’s V5RC Robotics Club has continued to learn, innovate, and excel in various local and international tournaments in Alberta. In December 2024, at STEM Innovation Academy, teams attended the first tournament of the season and most teams’ first tournament ever. All teams performed admirably, with some reaching the quarterfinals and placing in the top 10 out of 45 after qualifications. In early February 2025, our very own team 3300C composed of students Graeme, Nykin, Dean, Fergus, and Aris, took home a “triple crown”, the three most prized awards given out at any tournament: the Excellence Award, Skills Champion Award, and Tournament Champion Award. A few days later, all teams attended Mecha Mayhem, an international tournament with over 150 teams from around the world in attendance at the BMO Centre. Mecha Mayhem is one of the toughest tournaments in the world, with the teams facing an intense three days of competition. The hard work of all the teams paid off, as one of our teams placed 11th in robot skills, an incredible feat considering the extreme competition during the tournament. In late February, some teams attended the robotics Provincial Championships in Fort MacMurray. Our teams’ hard work and dedication led to an outstanding performance as team 3300C placed in the top 10 in qualifications and became the robot skills champion of Alberta for having the highest robot skills in the tournament. This places 3300C in the top 60 in the world, an amazing feat considering over 6000 teams have scores to beat. This marks the highest a team in Alberta has placed in the past four years and the highest in our school’s history. 3300C, as a result, have been invited to the high school VEX World Championship in Dallas this year. This is an incredibly rare and coveted invitation, allowing them to compete on the world stage for high school robotics to represent Canada and Western Canada High School.

Our teams’ successes set a high bar for the entire competition in Alberta, and we are incredibly proud of everyone’s achievements. Throughout the entire season, students have learned vital engineering, teamwork, communication, and stress management skills from their time in robotics. We hope to see them continue to push the boundaries of innovation and excellence in robotics, constantly growing and refining their skills to build better robots in the seasons to come. Cheers to an excellent season and more to come, and good luck to team 3300C. We’ll be cheering you on at Worlds from Calgary!

 Go Redhawks!

Here is the video of 3300C winning the autonomous skills run. In competition, there is only one driver in the province that can get a higher skills score than 3300C's robot can autonomously (self-driving). This is an unbelievable programming accomplishment for a high school team.