ECI ROBORAM HISTORY
The first year that Etobicoke Collegiate Institute entered the Canada First Robotics Competition was 1996. The theme from was "Pharaoh's Pholly" and the object was to collect balls from a centre pyramid, and then deposit them in your own goal. Balls left in your quadrant counted as negative points. We pulled a sneaky trick by putting empty containers into another team's goal to prevent them from scoring. Needless to say, this resulted in all out war. For the rest of the competition, we were thwarted at every attempt to score, and as a result our overall score was very low. We did not place as well as we thought we could have, but that is the nature of any competition. In 1996 we had the only female driver of any team in the competition. Kerry Helston was interviewed by The Toronto Star and featured in an article.
1997 brought about "Tower Power Basketball". Fueled by our desire to have a better performance than the last year, the 1997 Roboram was put through a tougher design stage. The students were divided into separate groups to combat the various ideas rather than all working on a single idea, as in 1996. The final product proved to be more effective than the previous design. We learned a lot from the last year, and decided not to pull any tricks. This resulted in less combat and more chances to score. We only scored twice, but were the only team to do so using a vacuum.
PREVIOUS ACCOMPLISHMENTS
E.C.I.’s achievements in the Canada FIRST Robotics Competition in previous years were fairly good. In 1996, our first year, E.C.I. came in 17th place in Canada. We also won the competition for best binder. Last year we came in 11th place in Canada. Seeing that we are slowly climbing up the ladder, we hope this year we will get in the top five... maybe even first!!