Robotics was one of many skills on display as area high school students competed at SkillsBC competitions at VIU on Thursday, Feb. 27. (Alex Rawnsley/NanaimoNewsNOW)

By Alex Rawnsley

FIERCE COMPETITION

VIDEO: Area students face off in challenging skills and trades competitions

Feb 27, 2020 | 1:20 PM

NANAIMO — Hundreds of elementary and high school students pushed their skills to the limit in a wide variety of competitions.

Roughly 500 students from Nanaimo, Ladysmith, Duncan and Powell River descended on VIU on Thursday, Feb. 27 to face-off against each other in almost a dozen different disciplines including carpentry, robotics, hairdressing, culinary arts and public speaking.

Jesse Scott-Bradley, a grade 12 student at Wellington Secondary School, said his team’s robotics entry is the culmination of months worth of work.

“We’ve been working through the first and second semester to get this robot done,” Scott-Bradley said. “There’s been some days where we’ve been staying in the robotics room for three or four hours to get the robot ready to compete.”

Their entry was designed to move blocks from one end of an obstacle course to another.

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Scott-Bradley said robotics forces you to check and double-check your work and encourages critical thinking.

“I’ve learned to be more careful and check over things more than twice because that’s what it takes. A lot of robotics is finding problems and solving them,” Scott-Bradley said.

Michelle Skelly, director of programs with skills with Skills Canada BC, told NanaimoNewsNOW the preparation and competition exposes students to different trades-based career options.

“They get to do that through hands on competition, working in teams and it exposes them to the opportunity of post-secondary education at VIU,” Skelly said.

She added most competitions reinforce lessons taught through STEM courses taught in schools to encourage further study and careers in engineering, design and technology.

Winners from the competition at VIU move to provincials in Abbotsford in April. The national competition is hosted in Vancouver for the first time in almost a decade during the last weekend of May.

alex.rawnsley@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @alexrawnsley