Innisfail's Nicholas Ekelund competed with the world's best robotic teams and emerged one goal shy of travelling to St Louis for the American USFIRST championship.
But that was just fine for the 17-year-old home-schooled robotics whiz kid who competed against teams from the United States, Mexico and the rest of Canada.
“This is my second robotics competition,” said Ekelund. “Last year I attended PHRD VEX which was held in Edmonton and learned a lot which helped me this year. We did very well in the final three games but fell one goal, or 10 points short of first.”
Ekelund has been involved with robotics for five years, getting started by playing with Lego and experimenting. He was introduced to competitive robotics by his math teacher and coach Phoebe Arcilla, who took the teen to VEX in 2013 and then to the Western First Robotics Competition (FCR) in Calgary from April 2 to 4 this year at the Scotiabank Saddledome as part of the Harry Ainlay FRC Team.
“The theme of the competition was Aerial Assist and as teams, we had to build three robots per team that worked in alliances to score goals,” said Ekelund. “Just like a real human team, we had to pass, move, and ‘shoot' our balls into nets at the end of the field.”
The local teen worked with the Titanics, a robotics club out of Edmonton for six weeks to build their robots for the competition, every Saturday for nine hours. Each competitor was supplied with the “brains” of the robot and some items, but they had to come up with metal and wood pieces, hardware items and learn machining skills.
“We even had to make our own bolts and nuts for the robots,” said Ekelund. “So during the process, we learned an amazing amount of engineering and practical skills.”
Primarily a programmer, Ekelund had to teach himself C ++ and Java programming languages in order to “teach” the robots as well as machining skills.
“I like learning new skills,” added Ekelund. “At competitions like we just came from, there were so many people with incredible skills it was amazing. You could not help but come out of this inspired to do better next year which is our goal.”
The student is already looking forward to next year's competition, which will be held as part of FIRST Robotics Canada events. FIRST Robotics Canada has a mission of inspiring young people to pursue further studies and careers in the fields of science, technology and engineering.
As for Ekelund, no matter what the next competition holds, he has no fixed plans for the future other than to continue in robotics. He has a whole year to practise.
