Team 2809 K-Botics
2809 at the Championships in St. Louis 2011
Overall K-Botics has two main goals:
- Work together as a team to design and build a competitive robot, present an impressive Chairman’s Award submission, and continue our record of positive community involvement.
- Build strong community and school partnerships which will raise the profile of science and technology in the Kingston and global community.
What a Close Knit Team
Our close knit team is composed of students from grades 8-12, from academic, applied, French Immersion, and IB programs. This year, we are excited to have two grade 8 students with us who have added curiosity, a sense of wonder, and some creative design ideas.
We welcome all students who are willing to learn new skills. This philosophy promotes the formation of a large and diverse team with a wide range of skills and interests. Among our ranks we have future carpenters, engineers, video game designers, attorneys, doctors, endocrinologists, prosthetists, concept artists, mathematicians and pokémon trainers.
Our team comes together to build a robot, but in doing so we have become more than just a robotics team. We are a big purple family, complete with traditions, and inside jokes. We eat dinner and celebrate birthdays together. 
We help each other with homework, and studying for exams. Everyone on our team has someone to look up to, and learn from.
Most of our mentors have FIRST hand experience with the competition’s abbreviated timeline and strategy. Coming from FIRST teams 610, 771, 772, 1114, 1620, and from our very own 2809; they each bring their own set of problem-solving skills. Word has spread about our team and we’re always welcoming new mentors to help us out.
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We have a hands on approach to learning. From cooperative brainstorming, CAD, programming and fabrication of the robot to safety, public speaking and marketing, skills training is integrated into our daily routine. Some surprising life skills have also been learned such as: grocery shopping, cooking, washing dishes, knitting, dancing, how to ask for help, and how to talk with the media.
K-Botics is very active in our community. This past fall our members mentored FLL teams and we hosted a successful FLL Qualifying Tournament and Jr. FLL Expo. We demonstrate our robots at local elementary schools, and at every parent-teacher night at KCVI. Community demos have included both the Limestone Learning Foundation Crystal Ball Gala and Charity Golf Tournament.
For the past several years we have organized a Shoreline Clean-Up for the Great Canadian Shoreline Clean-Up, and participated in the Terry Fox Run, and Relay For Life with our school.
We make our own kind of crazy fun here at K-Botics. We have had bus-raves with music and glowsticks to make our late night long drives more enjoyable. We also started the “Bagel Awards” which recognized the positive contributions of each team member with a bagel medallion.
glowsticks on the bus
“My best and most memorable moment of the tournament was the bus-bonding. It was good to have the opportunity to let loose and have some fun on the bus really early in the morning during the bus rave.”–Remi (Queen’s Mentor)
Through the challenge of FIRST robotics we have expanded our horizons and come together to solve intense problems. Our diverse team has come together to accomplish our goals. We recognize that we are more than the sum of our parts. Working together we can accomplish more than we even imagined.
Random facts about our team: We speak 12 languages
