Bots, Gears, and Glory: Kade & Marek's Robotics Ride

In this episode, we sit down with Kade Hamre and Marek Fournier from Brooks Composite High School, the robotics duo who powered their way to gold at the 2025 Provincial Skills Canada Competition—earning a spot on Team Alberta—and went on to claim silver at the 2025 Nationals in Regina.

Kade and Marek share what it was like to prepare for competition, the challenges of designing and building a successful robot, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. From long hours of testing to the thrill of competing against the best in Canada, their journey is full of innovation, teamwork, and determination.

Tune in to hear how these two young innovators engineered their way to success!

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:05

Welcome to Skills and Thrills, Alberta's Trade and Tech Youth podcast by Skills Canada Alberta. We feature the stories of Skills alumni through sharing their accomplishment experiences and how those moments shape their careers. Through casual, unscripted conversations, we explore the journeys behind the skills and the paths that followed. I'm Danny and I'll be your host. Let's dive in for today's episode. Today we're joined by two skills alumni guests, Merrick Foignet and Kate Hammer. Earlier this year, Merrick and Kate competed at the 2025 Provincial Skills Canada Competition in Robotics, where they secured first place and a spot on Team Alberta. They went on to represent the province at the Skills Canada National Competition in Regina, bringing home a silver medal. Hey Kate and Merrick, and thank you for coming on the podcast today. How are you both doing?

SPEAKER_00 0:56

I'm doing great so far. Um I'm glad to be here. I'm also doing pretty good.

SPEAKER_02 1:01

Awesome. All right, well, let's jump right into your robotics story. Can you start by sharing how you both first got into mobile robotics and what sparked you to compete?

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Okay. So for mobile robotics, I really got interested in since probably in my ninth grade year. I was looking around on YouTube and I saw this uh these videos of Boston Dynamics walking robots, the dog and the humanoid. And I was I was so enamored by them. Like all these moving parts, all this machinery all working together to make something that's almost like a human and a dog, like working at these different tasks, like moving, dancing, doing even parkour. And that's what really got me into it. I wanted to learn more about it and wanted to build these things, and I wanted to just be part of this industry that seems so innovative and like futuristic.

SPEAKER_02 1:53

That's really cool. I think the first time I ever saw mobile robotics, like the competition itself was actually in high school. There was a school close to me that was doing a competition for it, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I don't know if you guys have like seen it on TV, but I've seen it before as well, like people competing, and I think there's a movie as well of people competing with robotics. So it's just really cool to actually see it at the skills competitions.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

It's a very fun thing to build and to watch them go at it in different competitions. I think you're talking about the movie Real Steel, the one with Yes.

SPEAKER_02 2:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

One defined one to watch.

SPEAKER_02 2:29

It's so cool, and it it just shows people more to like robotics and film and stuff like that. Because you don't often see that kind of competition in film and stuff. So yeah, it's cool. Can you guys tell us the start of your skills journey and go from there all the way up to nationals and how it was for you?

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Yeah, sure. At provincials, we were easily in the top two with a team from Grand Prairie. It was going to be either of us that won the event. And we kind of were thinking that they were gonna win, but at the last minute, we were able to turn around the whole event and sneak our way through and get that win at provincials, which led us to nationals. At nationals, we showed up at the level of competition at nationals. It's incredible. It is so much higher than anything you'll see at provincials. We were able to just keep performing well and stay focused and fix all the problems we had. And that led us to second only to Ontario.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

Yeah, that's awesome. It was so cool to watch you guys, by the way. It was intense, but like really exciting. And it was just so cool to watch you guys do that at Nationals. Did you guys have like a mentor that really helped you along this journey?

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Throughout our career in robotics, we had some sort of mentor. We had our technology teacher at the composite high school who did introduce us to robotics and all the parts and manufacturers that we would need to make our competition go in our favor. He gave us the keys, and then we would be the ones opened the door.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Our teacher sort of represented like an investor giving us what we needed to succeed, but it wasn't really him giving us ideas.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Many of our ideas came from our ourselves.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

Do you guys mind kind of going more into the process of how you build your robot and how you prepare it for the competition?

SPEAKER_01 4:22

I guess we can both answer this question, but I'll go first. For my sake, I focused a lot more on the mechanical engineering aspects rather than the simple robotic of the bot. I tried to make my structure as stable as possible, and I tried to think outside the box and find ideas online too. I'd say the most important thing to being successful is to make sure that your bot has as little room for failure as possible. So many bots throughout the events had little malfunctions that cost them the whole event, and ours never did.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

So for a robot, we really like to look into the details of what'll make us more efficient while keeping it as stable as possible. So for things such as Cage Cheetah Robot, where we had to pick up those snowballs and shoot them across a thing, we had to make sure that those flywheels that were moving at incredibly high speeds, about 3,000 RPM, were not disrupting the rest of the robot or making it break apart on itself due to those subtripital forces. So we made sure to reinforce it with a lot of metal and a lot of a lot of rubber.

SPEAKER_01 5:30

I actually have an interesting thing to add on specifically to the flywheel. We ended up buying like external bearings that are used for vehicles instead of robots because we needed something that could handle that much motion. It was really a challenge to get that working on the flywheel.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

Yeah. So more into the more like the errors of the robot. So we made sure to make sure everything was secure because we thought in our competitions, both provincially and nationally, that a lot of failures were because certain parts were not secure. Such as an example from Saskatchewan was they had a mechanism that picked up the snowballs with a different sort of flywheel that broke down near the end of the competition, which ended up costing them the second place, and we took it instead.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

There's another case of that actually. The Ontario bot, the team that won the whole event in the final round, their bot broke down and their flywheels fell off. If that had happened even a minute earlier, we could have maybe ended up winning.

SPEAKER_02 6:32

Interesting. Yeah, I guess there's like a lot that can make or break your robot during the competition, eh?

SPEAKER_00 6:37

That's why they give us months ahead to prepare just so we come in prepared and we're ready to go up against these competitions very strenuous on all our robots.

SPEAKER_02 6:47

Yeah, for sure. You definitely need the time. Do you guys mind talking more about the competition itself? Like how you prepare months in advance, and then competition day, like what do you guys go through to then compete?

SPEAKER_00 7:00

So for preparing for the competition, we made sure that we have every part that we need coming with us, even if we don't believe it's not a hard percent necessarily. So in the month leading up to, we made sure that all our tools were packed and all our spare parts are packed, and all our metal was packed just in case any failure happened to all the robots, as well as making sure those robots were secure and transported well, because anything breaking on the way would be detrimental to our competition. It's probably one of the more stressful parts of the competition is just making sure that your robot actually comes to the competition one piece, which was very stressful for us. So we made sure to have our parents take it with us instead of leading it to the airlines handling it in the case that something might break. On our competition day, we got introduced to all the things we had to do, our mainstay competition as well as a secondary autonomous competition that we competed in. So the main one, which I'd like to dive deeper into, was the main focus of the event where we had to do this big snowball fight with our snowball collectors and our block builders and make sure the snowmen at the back were safe and secure while also ensuring that the enemy snowmen were knocked over. So we did two days of that. First day would be mostly round robin brackets, where we would base off against every other team at least once. And then the second day was a full bracket tournament where it was double elimination, which we team out second in in that competition.

SPEAKER_02 8:30

That's awesome. So, like, how how is it different provincially to nationally? Like, how's the competition different for you guys?

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Well, to start with, provincials, there were probably 15 teams there, 13, I'm gonna say, which is very, very similar to nationals, but it is a little bit less in comparison from provincials to nationals. We made so many changes. If we brought our provincial level bot to nationals, it would have been awful for us. We wouldn't have won.

SPEAKER_02 8:58

Interesting. So, what did you guys like really change provincially to nationally for your robot?

SPEAKER_01 9:04

I'll start with my changes because I think I have the most drastic ones. So at provincials, we had a lot more emphasis on getting the snowballs across, and that was the biggest thing. So the way my bot would aim was just lobbing snowballs across, and that was good. We always were able to get more balls across than the other team, and it was able to get us through provincials just fine. But what we realized was that the actual best strategy was to try and knock over the other team's snowman on the other side. So our way of doing that was to change the ramp on my bot entirely. So it barely even shoots at an angle at all. It shoots almost straight on and is able to shoot with more power and knock things over on the other side. And it was definitely an amazing change, and it was able to do a lot of really good things for us.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Yeah, so for my robot, I think we have two robots in the competition. Mine is mainly focused on stacking the blocks. So the main downfall of my robot in the provincial competition was that it couldn't stack quite fast enough and quite high enough to get the maximum point we had to stack a little bit higher than what my robots did be. So I focused mainly on making it more stable as well as adding length to its arm to allow it to reach higher places and grab blocks more efficiently, make sure everything is secure on the snow piles, as well as being able to grab snowmen and place them back up because that's something you could do during the competition.

SPEAKER_02 10:22

I really like how you guys learn different ways to like really make it work the best it could for nationals. That's awesome. So in the competition for robotics, can you talk a little bit more about the different parts of it? So, like I see at the competition you guys are working on your robot a little bit, and then you're testing it, then you guys are competing to see whose robot is the best. Can you talk a little bit more about the competition itself so people have a better idea of what it's like?

SPEAKER_00 10:52

So for a competition, it is essentially a giant sport. We have different teams here that prepare their robots to play in these games where you would have to basically play in a snowball fight. You'd make your snow forts with foam blocks, you'd throw snowballs with cotton balls, and then you would try and aim and knock down over snowmen on the enemy team's side, which were made of foam. So the main point of the competition was to try and make sure that all the snowballs were in the enemy team side, all your foam blocks were stacked up as high as possible, and your enemy team snowmen were knocked over. That would give you the maximum points and let you win each game. So in the main, while you're not competing during the competition, you would be making sure that all parts of your robot were ready to go in for the next match against a different team. So essentially what we do is play every other every other team until the second day where we switch it into a main bracket tournament where if you got eliminated twice, you would be out of the competition, and that would be your final ranking for the competition, as well as taking in consideration what you did in the round prompt. So we would make sure that all our bots were ready by testing each part, making sure there was no failures for the next match, and making sure all our batteries were fully charged and ready to go.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

Cool. Yeah, honestly, it's like one of the coolest competitions to watch. If anyone's listening right now, you should definitely go check it out at our next provincials. Because it's it's so cool to watch people compete in robotics. Do you guys have like a memorable moment from competing that you would like to share?

SPEAKER_01 12:35

I think we both probably have one.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

I would say against Saskatchewan during the bracket round. That's a really good one. We had two matches against Saskatchewan during the bracket rounds because it was double elimination. So our first round against Saskatchewan was very intense for us because Saskatchewan came ahead of us during round robin and beat us during those initial matches. So we were scared that we were gonna lose against Saskatchewan and get third overall in the competition, which is not something we wanted. Uh coming up into the match, we made sure every part of our robots were all good, as well as our third robot, which was an automated robot designed to just throw snowballs in this small area. We would make sure it was delayed to make sure that Saskatchewan didn't have enough balls to throw over at the end of the match. So what it would do is wait till the last minute and throw over all the s snowballs it could to ensure that Saskatchewan didn't have enough time to throw them over. Because essentially what Saskatchewan did was hoard all the snowballs into this giant bucket on the robot, which would then rapid fire them at the end of the match, making sure they won and had the other team not be able to retaliate at all, which is a strategy that is both kind of smart and also very insurating for everybody else. So during that match, it was very intense. Me and Cade were both making sure that we threw as little snowballs as possible, as well as stacking up of our boards as high as we could to ensure that we get the maximum points, and in case anything fell, we would block the areas with our own robot because they were a little bit bigger, a little bit bulkier. So at the end of the match, it was about tide. They both had their stacks up, we had our stacks up, and all four of our snowmen were still standing. The last minute, the our automated robot starts running, as well as Cade starts finally throwing all the snowballs that we collected over to them as quick as possible. And we managed to knock down, I believe, both their snowmen and one of their towers. We managed to get probably a little bit of both our towers and one of our snowmen. So we ended up winning that match just by a hair three points. The most exciting moment of the match because we were unsure if we were gonna win at that moment, and it only came down to a few points difference in our final competition.

SPEAKER_02 14:59

Wow, that's amazing. I can't imagine how intense that would be, especially in the final moments there.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

That was the a hundred percent the best match of the whole event. And for my memorable moment, it's not from our event specifically. I'm gonna talk about the opening ceremony because it was really, really cool to see after Provincials, which was Provincials was cool, but showing up to nationals and seeing every single team walk out with holding their flags and waving them, it was incredible. And what made it even better for me is I got to hold the flag for Alberta.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Oh, yeah, I saw that in the photo there. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

That was pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_02 15:37

Yeah. It's one of the coolest experiences, I think, is going to nationals and seeing that it's just unlike anything else, it's awesome. Did you guys want to talk about some challenges that you've come across during your competitions and how you made it past those?

SPEAKER_01 15:52

I've got a story for this one.

SPEAKER_02 15:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

So probably four days before we left for Nationals, we were doing our work on our autonomous portion. It's basically this kit that they give us for the autonomous portion only at Nationals. We got it after we won at Provincials. And we're working with this kit, and the port on the robot that is needed to upload code breaks.

SPEAKER_02 16:15

Oh no.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

And Merrick isn't with me at the time. Merrick's doing a show with his band that day. So he's with his band and they're preparing, and he's off his phone. So I have to organize with a few very helpful people to drive up to Edmonton the next morning to get a new brain. But as a last ditch effort, this guy comes into the place I work, and I know him because he's an electronics engineer. His name is Donovan Stang. He saved our lives. And I I asked him kind of as a joke if he knows what's wrong with it and if he could help. And he says, Oh yeah, I'm free. Takes me to his garage and he actually fixes it for us. And they saved me a trip to Edmonton. And Merrick didn't actually know about it until it was fixed.

SPEAKER_00 17:01

No clue any of this happened until Cage showed up to my performance later that night and told me the entire story. I don't know if I should have been angry or I should have been relieved. Relieved. That was a stressful five hours.

SPEAKER_01 17:16

It was bad.

SPEAKER_02 17:17

Yeah, I can't imagine. Well, shout out to that guy because that holy wow.

SPEAKER_00 17:22

Save you.

SPEAKER_02 17:23

Yeah, truly. Do you have any others you'd want to talk about?

SPEAKER_00 17:27

Probably the biggest one, honestly. I think that's probably the most notable bars. Of course, we had some times during a competition where things would break, but we can quickly fix them after and be ready for the next match.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

Like, I guess there's the fact that at Provincials, lunch on the second day, I remember sitting down and being like, okay, how are we gonna podium? We did not think it was gonna go well because we started to just struggle at everything we were doing. But those challenges sort of just weren't they were overcome as we kept going. We had a few lucky moments that really helped us get through provincials. Like I shot a snowball across and it got stuck in the other team's flywheel, and that pushed us to the finals. It was a team that probably could have beat us, but we broke their bot down on accident.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

And it's not really permitted to intentionally break the other bot.

SPEAKER_01 18:14

It wasn't intentional. I wouldn't have even thought it was possible. If a snowball got stuck in my flywheel, I don't I don't think it would break my bot. I didn't expect that at all.

SPEAKER_02 18:24

Let's talk more about building your robot and making it successful for the competition. What did you guys learn going from provincials to nationals of what makes a really successful robot?

SPEAKER_00 18:36

For making a really successful robot compared to most of our the other robots is just ensuring that you get the maximum amount of points you can. So both our robots starting at provincials could get a very good amount of points, a very respectable amount of points, but not the maximum. Mostly because my stacker couldn't stack high enough to get those maximum points for the snowblocks. So going into nationals, we had to make sure that everything we did could ensure that we got the maximum points. We couldn't leave anything out to just hoping that the other team was worse than us. So that's what we did. We reinforced our strengths by making our flywheel stronger, faster, more accurate, and making our arm longer, more stable, and quicker. And going into nationals, we were very confident because we played to the strengths of our robots and made sure that they were even stronger than they were in provincials.

SPEAKER_01 19:27

And then what we learned from other teams is that to be actually the best, you have to use every single centimeter worth of space. If you look at our boss and you look at the Ontario bots, ours are fairly simple to look at. Ontario is this giant machine with zero open space. You don't even know what you're looking at. It's incredible.

SPEAKER_02 19:52

It was pretty interesting to just like look at the differences between all the robots too and how they worked individually. It was just it's really interesting.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Yeah. There's for competitions like these, there's so much room for interpretation and how you want to get those points that a lot of the strategies everybody did was almost like completely different, other than the shooting mechanisms, because every successful team just decided to use a flywheel like a baseball shooter to get it over the thing. That was probably the most efficient that most people could think of.

SPEAKER_01 20:24

Did Yukon use a catapult?

SPEAKER_00 20:27

Uh yeah. A couple teams use a catapult, but they it was never good.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

It wasn't a good idea, but they did do it.

SPEAKER_00 20:33

So a team with catapult they made over like more than three subwalls in a match.

SPEAKER_01 20:38

Catapult wasn't the way to go.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Yeah, for most of the teams when it comes to stacking and protecting snowmen, it was very up to interpretation on what they wanted to do. Such as like making giant nests to protect their snowmen, or using how Ontario team did it, using suction cups to make sure their snow stacks were just right on their robot and couldn't be taken down until like the very end of the competition where they had to like open.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

Or the idea of teams using claws to pick up their snowmen and place them right at the end so nobody can knock them over. There was a lot of interpretation of what could be done that I would have never even thought of.

SPEAKER_02 21:20

Yeah, it's it's honestly so cool to see the innovation there and everything. So that's so cool. I think going back to provincials, what was it like to place first and then join Team Alberta?

SPEAKER_01 21:32

It was I think the best word is it was a relief. It was this moment where after probably five hours of thinking it wasn't gonna happen, somehow we walked out thinking it was gonna happen. And it was really crazy going to the building and waiting and really hoping that when they call our names to the stand, it's not for that second place position and it is for that first. And going up there, it's almost it's almost hard to remember. It went super fast standing on that podium. But I remember walking down and being brought into the room and getting the Team Alberta shirts, and it was it was really an amazing moment. And then after it happened, going to the banquet room and meeting about nationals, it felt like all that adrenaline had finally gone and it was just relief. It was really cool.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

Just kind of showing that yes, all the hard work that you did in the months prior actually paid off, and you actually made Team Alberta, and all the effort you put into your competition was worth it in the end.

SPEAKER_02 22:35

A lot of people just say, like, yes, my hard work paid off, like all those hours and everything, the training, it all paid off, and it was it's just amazing. Going to nationals, what was it like to play second in robotics?

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Okay. So going up to that competition and putting in our hardest work to make sure that we got as high as possible and managing to come out second out of all the teams that showed up at nationals was quite a good feeling to know that all the hard work that we did, like making sure that we did our best our competition, just focusing hard on a robot almost like not even stopping for the two days, even when we got to the hotel, we were thinking about new ways to win over our competition. Just getting the feeling that, yeah, that hard work paid off again.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

And I would a hundred percent agree with all of that, but second was also the most bittersweet feeling of all time. I knew going into it that we were only gonna get second at best. Ontario was a level above, but there were certain moments that make you think, wow, I wish that could have happened three seconds earlier. Like the Ontario flywheel falling off, things like that. You can't help but wonder what would have happened.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

Yeah. Yeah, I totally get that.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

But we went home with basically exactly what we thought was possible, and we got it, and that's great. Which is probably more than what we'd be asking. The only way we could have got first was if Ontario messed up bad, and that wouldn't have been as much of a win. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:13

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, making it to Team Alberta is incredible, but yeah, getting on the podium is like the cherry on the cake. Do you guys have any other incredible memories just from being at the national competition in Regina or just being in Regina with Team Alberta at all?

SPEAKER_00 24:30

I think meeting our bellow competitors was for Team Alberta was probably a very nice experience. We gotta meet a lot of cool people in that team and see their competitions and get a more in-depth look into what they actually did, which was very interesting just knowing that so many people have so many different talents and being with them on the same team was an amazing experience, to be honest.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

I think it was definitely one of the coolest parts of the whole event, those people that we met, people like all of them basically from the same school, which I found kind of funny.

SPEAKER_00 25:04

There was a lot of people from Calgary, I believe. Ernest Manning, yeah. Ernest Manning. Maybe we'll visit them sometime, who knows?

SPEAKER_01 25:12

Yeah, like Diego and who else were actually I've already hung out with Cooper like four times since the event. And it he came and watched our soccer tournament in Calgary and came for dinner with us.

SPEAKER_02 25:23

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

Cooper's a great guy.

SPEAKER_02 25:26

Honestly, one of the best parts too is just like making friends who are also in the trades or like similar trades and making those friendships and stuff. Do you have any advice for future competitors looking to compete in robotics?

SPEAKER_01 25:38

I think my biggest piece of advice is don't neglect the mechanical aspects of the competition. When you think of robotics, you're always going to think of coding, but the mechanical aspects of the competition are what make or break your event. There are people more talented at coding than us at that event, but we performed incredibly well because we had mechanically sound bots. Our bots didn't malfunction, and our bots could just do the job with limited code.

SPEAKER_00 26:06

I'd say my biggest piece of advice and what probably got us the edge on most competitors there is just making a test arena in our own home. It got us a taste of what the actual competition would be like and what we would have to do, which I think was a great experience and definitely gave us the knowledge of how to actually win this competition by just knowing what the arena looks like, what we have to do, all like all that. I'd say that's the biggest thing about winning is knowing what your competition is.

SPEAKER_02 26:35

Man, that's so cool. You guys have a little test arena and everything. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 26:40

Definitely a good decision.

SPEAKER_02 26:41

Yeah. I mean, I feel like it really prepares you for it. Did you guys just come up with that idea yourselves to really prepare, or did you like see that somewhere else?

SPEAKER_00 26:50

Or we mostly came up with the idea on our own. So in the prior year where we got third in provincials, we had our own test arena with our bots, and that's what I believe got us a lot of advantage against other teams during that competition. So for last year, as we started with our test arena, we saw that we were doing so much better because we knew what we could do compared to the other teams, which kind of got there and didn't really get a taste of how their bots were performing the competition until they made it there. So after that work, we made sure that every year that we would compete, we would have that test arena in place to make sure everything went smoothly.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

And it was actually quite the struggle this year because last year we only needed an 8 by 16 foot arena. So we were able to build that pretty simply in the garage. This year we were planning on downsizing actually, because a 16 by 16 is such a large area, but we were able to make it work.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

Yeah. Just barely fence my garage, but and it was crucial. It was amazing. Because the competition relies on both teams competing against each other and altering game objects in each other's sides compared to last year, where you stay on your side and don't touch the other. We had to make sure that we get the biggest area possible and made sure that all the composers of the game were there and ready to be played against.

SPEAKER_02 28:10

That is so cool. Honestly, what a great piece of advice, too. I feel like you know, if you have the ability and you want to do this competition, it'd be great to have a tester like that to actually do the competition yourselves at your house.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Of course.

SPEAKER_02 28:24

That's so cool. Do you guys have anything else to add of like how you trained?

SPEAKER_01 28:30

We pretty much would set up and do our part of the competition on the other side while we had a friend or Merrick's mother on across from us just throwing snowballs back. It was helpful. It was good for fine-tuning the distance of shot on my robot. So I was able to shoot from the start point of the snowballs and hit the snowman perfectly.

SPEAKER_02 28:51

That's so cool. Everyone listening in who wants to do robotics, if that's a possibility, you should totally do that. I feel like that's awesome for training and getting ready. Awesome. Are you guys competing next year?

SPEAKER_01 29:02

We are. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 29:03

We are that's so cool. What grade are you? Are you guys still in high school?

SPEAKER_01 29:09

Going into grade 12, yes.

SPEAKER_02 29:10

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 29:11

Next year will be our last year.

SPEAKER_02 29:13

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited for you guys. Well, I hope all goes well. Do you guys like have any ideas of how you're gonna train for this next year, or is it about the same?

SPEAKER_00 29:24

Probably close to the same by building a test arena in our garage, just how we did last year. We just don't know what the competition is yet due to the scope being released in, I believe, September. Yeah, we'll know a lot more in a few weeks.

SPEAKER_02 29:38

Oh, that's so exciting. Well, I wish all the best for you guys with that. That's so awesome. I'm so glad you guys are competing again. All right, and what is your favorite thing about robotics?

SPEAKER_00 29:49

Okay. So I I would say mostly the building and the fact that you're creating new machinery to do a certain task. That's something like wholly made by you. I'd say that's probably. my favorite part of it is just the whole building something new for a competition. I love getting my hands into like working working on different machinery is just something that's so so fun and so like interesting to me just like how all of this future of modern technology is gonna work soon I would say. Just getting your getting acknowledging experience of how like technology works and preparing you for like the future where a lot of new innovations will be from robotics and that field.

SPEAKER_02 30:30

Awesome and how about you Kate?

SPEAKER_01 30:32

I think for me separate from robotics completely but related to robotics the competition of the event is better than the competition of any other event. I love the competitive spirit that goes along with these one-on-one competitions. There's something about them that is just it gets your heart racing more than any other skill I think that paired with the fact that you've designed the spot completely from scratch this was a hunk of metal and you turned it into something it's really an incredible event. It's definitely my favorite at skills.

SPEAKER_02 31:06

Yeah it's it's really really incredible. Well thank you both so much again for joining me on the podcast today it was amazing here by your Jordanian robotics. Thank you to everyone for tuning in. We will see you in the next one. Thanks again for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed today's episode and gained some valuable insights from our amazing guests. If you'd like to learn more about Skills Canada Alberta and our wide range of programs be sure to check out our website at skillsalberta.com from bringing skills right to your classroom to taking part in our competition programming there are countless ways to get involved and don't forget to follow us on social media at SkillsAlberta to stay up to date on our latest episodes and events. See you in the next one