Hundreds of grade 4-8 students from across Halton descended on Burlington’s Gary Allen Learning Centre this week to build machines, edit video, and get some hands-on experience in STEM programming.
The Halton Skills Competition was held in late February.
“This is the 33rd year we’ve run the Halton Skills Competition, and the students are competing in 14 different trades and technologies,” Sarah Patterson, instructional program lead for elementary science and technology for the Halton District School Board said. “We have TV and video, animation, construction, workplace safety, robotics, and other technology challenges.”
Across two days, more than 1,100 students participated in the events, the most the skills competition has ever had.
Fourth grade student Noah was trying to build a forklift-type machine able to grab small boxes off of a shelf. Using a handful of plastic syringes, he and a group of fellow students were working on the lift mechanism of the forklift.
“We’re using the syringes and tubes to push air through other syringes that will change the size, smaller or bigger,” Noah said. “It can grab the box, move it, or lift it.”
The syringes effectively acted as basic hydraulic systems, moving various components of the machine that was otherwise constructed from wood.
The Halton Skills Competition is used as a qualifying for the Ontario Skills Competition, to be held May 5. The events at each competition have to be similar enough for judges to decide who is ready to go to the provincial event, but unique enough to keep students on their toes.
“For some of our competitions, students know all the details ahead of time – what they’re building, the materials, but they don’t find out the scope of the project until they arrive on the day,” Patterson said. “It’s a lot of communicating, problem solving in the moment, and figuring out how to solve the challenge at hand.”
Depending on the challenge, some students are given prep time. LEGO robotics teams are aware of the challenges they will face, and have to design, build, and code their constructions. That just isn’t possible in one day, so they bring their completed works to the competition and make minor adjustments as needed.
Animation competitors on the other hand only get the day to storyboard, write, and animate their works.
Fourth grader Yusha worked all day on a story about a family meal.
“At the beginning, there is a family about to eat dinner,” he said. “They will talk about what they did in the morning, and then in another scene there will be a fireman saving a cat from a tree.”
Judging on all competitions will take some time, and competitors likely won’t know the final results until after March Break.
“It takes a while, especially for the animation and TV production competitions, we need to watch all of those videos,” Patterson said. “Including the ones from the first day.”
Patterson added the feeling in the rooms, seeing that many kids work together to solve a common problem in unique and different ways is always a highlight.