HOW WE STARTED

In 2022 the team was slowly coming to an end with 1 teacher running the club with 4 members that attended inconsistently. In mid-January of 2023 the teacher that was running the Vanguard robotics club who was also Jacob and William’s science teacher approached them to start attending robotics. "These two students were my last hope for the team, if they were not going to join I was going to end the program altogether." Said Bray. Jacob and William decided to attend one lunch meeting that the club had, there were about 8 people in the room, half of them not even doing robotics, frankly they were on their phones. “We were somewhat intrigued, but I could not tell you what they did or what it was going to be about, but you know il try it.” Said, Jacob. The room had maybe 30 tools, 4 work tables, 1 computer, 1 teacher and 4 members. All that to say that Jacob and William joined the club and encouraged their friends to join. The team increased to about 8 members and two mentors, Bray and Warren (Jacob’s dad). The club of 8 students, built an FRC robot using tank drive, a robot that barely moved, with the help of John from FIRST Quebec they got the robot moving using LabView. They went to the competition with the robot and some tools packed in Bray and Warren’s cars. At the competition, the team placed 38th out of 40th. The club also participated in the CRC (Canadian robotics competition) that year. Jacob found two sponsors to help us get through the year, there were amazing amounts of tool donations donated by Jacob’s community. Since the goal both Jacob and William had for this new year was to be better than our past. During that year we never gave up, members quit and joined. Meetings here and there and nowhere.

Next year 2024, it was definitely better but not there yet. We made a really nice CRC robot that we spent so much time building, coding, and practising. Not to mention that the team grew to about 15 members. Our first competition of the year was CRC. We did not just do the robot this year. We created a website, a video, tutorial even making a kiosk and having costumes. The theme that we chose at CRC was Toy Story, we had a kiosk group that designed and worked very hard to create these pieces of design. Our robot barely broke during this competition which we were very impressed about but, of course, it’s not high speed like FRC. In CRC we made it to the semifinals and finished overall in 12th place in the whole competition including our website, kiosk, costumes, video, tutorial, and robot scores. Not too bad we all had so much fun the whole time. Then we had FRC, well this was 7 days after the CRC. We also had not started building it before CRC, so we had 5 days to build, code and practise the robot. And it was March break the day after so what else would we do then load everything up? We brought it to Jacob and Warren’s house. We built the whole robot in Jacob’s garage. A huge shout out goes to Jacob, William, Nicholas and Charles for spending their march break in my garage building this robot, with the help from our mentors Olivier (from RTX), Warren (From CAE) and Jennifer. Code created with help from Warren and Carlos (mentors). There was absolutely no practice. We built it in 5 days, finishing the day before competition. So this year Jacob and William said no more. “This is our last year, we need to go out with a bang,” says Jacob. And this is only what has happened so far. Brand new technologies, new team structure with close to 40 members, 10 mentors, this is a great start for the year. Now this year will be a year to remember. This is the year it goes from Vanguard Robotics Club to the Vanguard Robotics Team. This team was saved by Jacob and William. And now we can't stop, there is so much more to come. Jacob and William have been both the Team Captains for Vanguard Robotics Team for 3 years. This is in fact both of their last years at Vanguard High School, after this year we hope that what we have turned this team into what will stay a team that will be recognized eventually.