Team 5672 First Nation Stem 2024 FIRST Canada highlights

By Adrian Bell, Team 5672 Driver

WIIKWEMKOONG UNCEDED TERRITORY – Team 5672 is a completely Indigenous team from Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory on Manitoulin Island, and for the past nine years, it has been attending the FIRST Canada Robotic competitions. But this year was another good year for 5762 as they brought great highlights and made it to the Ontario Provincial First Robotics Championship this past April.

Nipissing University was the start of this season’s competition for the team. Although disappointing, it still allowed the team to find structural and coding issues in its robot in preparation for McMaster University. The founder of 5672, Christopher Mara, describes this first event as “A catastrophic failure, it was as though we almost got hit with a huge tsunami that we wouldn’t have come back from.” Despite an almost monumental failure, the team still received the judge’s award.

McMaster University was the second event of the season, and Team 5762 came up from a 27-team deficit putting them at a provincial ranking of 101. Towards the end of the competition, the team was scouted and selected for alliance eight by Team 7200, Banting Robotics. Along with an amazing team performance, Team 5672 also integrated cultural activities and pieces such as smudging circles, beading demonstrations, birch bark moose caller cheering, and a live Jingle and Fancy dance performed by Chyella George and Avanya Wakegijig during the opening ceremony.

The Provincial Championship was overwhelming, but still, the team managed to persevere. It demonstrated this by winning a 2 versus 3 match due to technical difficulties experienced by one of their alliance team’s robots. Though the team did not qualify for the world championship, this competition and season was a great learning experience for Team 5762.

It was a challenging year as Team 5672 had to get back on track after the COVID-19 global pandemic. But against all odds, Team 5672 demonstrated perseverance, teamwork, relevance to Indigenous culture by implementing it into First Robotics, and its overall growth as a team attending First Canada Robotics for its ninth year in a row.