Sunday, February 16th, 2025

The Cybergnomes FIRST Robotics Team is back from St. Louis, Missouri, where it placed 14th in the world among 2,700 teams at the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship.

“It’s the first time in eight years that the team has qualified to go,” said Cybergnome Patrick Belford, who is a Grade 11 student at Stayner Collegiate Institute.

FIRST stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. The organization’s mission is to inspire young people to pursue further studies and careers in science, technology and engineering.

Eighteen students from SCI, Nottawasaga Pines Secondary School and Barrie North Collegiate Institute made the 16-hour drive to St. Louis last week to compete against fellow electronics inventors from countries around the world including Israel, Saudi Arabia, China, Mexico and Japan.

To make the Cybergnomes’ accomplishment even more remarkable is the fact that most of the other teams had at least 30 members; the winning team from the U.S. had 100.

The Cybergnomes won two matches out of three in the quarter finals as part of an alliance with three other teams from the U.S. to make it to the semi-final competition. They placed third in Canada and second in Ontario. The team is now ranked in the top 1.8% of FIRST Robotics teams in the world.

The Cybergnomes spent 45 days this winter building their robot, called the “Rattrap,” out of mostly aluminum at JT’s Snowmobile Repair in New Lowell. They qualified for the World Championship after winning the Western Canada Regional competition in Calgary in early April.

“We made it much farther than we thought we were going to,” said Patrick. “We did pretty good for a few hicks in a snowmobile shop!”

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