\u201cWatching them in the stands, I was so proud of our team, but I was so proud of Canadians because we were the only team from Ontario there and here was our little team of students up on stage with their Canadian flag held up and proud, presenting to the whole world,\u201d says teacher-coach Renee Northrup. \u201cEveryone was talking about the French team from Canada against students who were all the way up to Grade 10. They\u2019re five years older and in high school and these guys got it done!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This pride was shared amongst team members on Friday afternoon when they sat down with The Auroran to reflect on their experiences \u2013 just an hour before setting out that evening for a celebratory night at Cineplex seeing How to Train Your Dragon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt means a lot to come back having first place in a robot match because this is my first year ever doing robotics, and I\u2019m surprised we got this far,\u201d says student Chase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It shouldn\u2019t come as much of a surprise though for residents \u2013 and local sponsors \u2013 who have followed the team as they\u2019ve gone from strength-to-strength year over year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m really proud because it\u2019s really hard to get a perfect score, and it\u2019s [with] 108 teams, so it\u2019s really hard to get first place in a robot game, so I\u2019m really proud,\u201d notes student Patrick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each year, students must build a robot that can take on a number of challenges related to that season\u2019s chosen theme: Water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When asked what helped the team rise to the top, Northrup listed three key attributes: grit, perseverance and hard work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThese eight kids never gave up,\u201d she says, noting a few of the obstacles they encountered themselves throughout the series of games, including falling just shy of a perfect score in one area when a couple of the krill fell out of the whale their robot was trying to feed. \u201cIt was such an accidental thing, but everything went perfectly. We were so proud of them. We thought this would be their maximum score, but the kids were like, \u2018Oh, no, we came to this competition with a robot capable of doing a perfect score, we\u2019re going at this again.\u2019 In their very last match, the second last session of the matches before the very end of the international competition, the kids went to the table, just looked at each other and said, \u2018You know what? We\u2019re going to do this.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cScott and I, the two coaches, stood there and watched as they got every single mission done perfectly on the table and we had five seconds to spare at the end and watched the other team finish up and we cheered like crazy. We\u2019re super proud of them. They just never gave up.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Adds student Madeline: \u201cI was like, \u2018Yay! We did it! I felt proud of our team for achieving our goal. That\u2019s why we came to this competition.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As they celebrated their win in front of the international crowd, \u00c9quipe Francobotique also had the chance to let the world in on an innovative solution they presented here in Aurora last month at the Town\u2019s Youth Innovation Fair, which centred on new ideas to monitor freshwater lake health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a huge honour to present their innovation project on the main stage during the Closing Ceremonies in front of thousands of people in attendance from 28 different countries, 108 teams and all of their coaches and extras that came to watch them in competition,\u201d says Northrup. \u201cThere were also 3,000 people on Twitch that watched them live as they presented on stage.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt felt great and I felt nervous at the same time because thousands of people were watching us present our innovation project,\u201d adds Allegra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the near future, however, many more thousands might benefit from the innovation project as the team takes it to the next level with a grant through the Learning for Sustainable Future fund and a partnership with the Federation of Ontario Cottagers\u2019 Association to deploy their product \u2013 a new kind of buoy \u2013 into a lake in northern Ontario.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOur solution addresses the problem of missing or incomplete water quality data in Canada and worldwide,\u201d explains Chase. \u201cAs a solution to this problem, we\u2019ve created Century 226, a low-cost, autonomous, durable, reliable, and multi-parameter water quality measurement system that can be deployed in most freshwater bodies around the whole entire world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhat makes our project so different,\u201d Patrick continues, \u201cis that it\u2019s very low-cost so researchers who don\u2019t have much money can buy it and, as it\u2019s autonomous, you don\u2019t need to send a professional researcher in a boat to collect data. They can just take their phone, put it close to the buoy, and Bluetooth connects it to the phone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Madeline adds from there the data can be downloaded and sent into an international database.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Federation of Ontario Cottagers Association (FOCA) has agreed to not only pay for construction of the buoy, which is quite large, about a metre-and-a-half wide by a metre-and-a-half wide, and they\u2019re actually going to deploy it in August and it\u2019s becoming the major research focus for FOCA for the next two years \u2013 their little elementary school project!\u201d says Northrup. \u201cThey\u2019ve really revolutionized water quality measurement for Ontario and maybe worldwide once this thing gets deployed because their industry partner is going full ahead and is going to be deploying their idea, which is super-incredible!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n\r\n As Aurora\u2019s \u00c9quipe Francobotique, an accomplished French-language student team in the FIRST Lego League, settled into the opening ceremonies at this month\u2019s WAFFLE International Championships in Worcester, MA, they were amongst their peers from 28 nations \u2013 which were name-checked for an eager crowd. Well, with one complication. The Great White North was, for one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":36474,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/2025-06-26-03.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-9uh","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-14 09:06:57","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36475,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36473\/revisions\/36475"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Facebook\"](\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newspapers-online.com%2Fauroran%2Fwp-json%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts%2F36473&t=%C3%89quipe%20Francobotique%20stands%20strong%20on%20the%20world%20stage%20representing%20Canada&s=100&p[url]=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newspapers-online.com%2Fauroran%2Fwp-json%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fposts%2F36473&p[images][0]=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newspapers-online.com%2Fauroran%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2025%2F06%2F2025-06-26-03.jpg&p[title]=%C3%89quipe%20Francobotique%20stands%20strong%20on%20the%20world%20stage%20representing%20Canada\" "\\"Share")
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