Okotoks students have once again proven to have national-level skills.
Foothills Composite Grade 12 students Tom Wyzykoski and Camilla Tran earned bronze medals in electronics and architecture tech, respectively, at the Skills Canada National Competition, held May 30-31 in Quebec City.
“It’s good to come away with a national medal and good to show that our school can compete nationally,” Wyzykoski said. “It’s good to show that our school isn’t this random place in Alberta and that CTS (career and technology studies) actually means something here.”
Wyzykoski said his mindset is about moving on to the next challenge. For Tran, there was initial disappointment in not finishing on top of the podium.
“I would have really like gold,” Tran said. “But it does mean a lot that all of my work did accomplish something.”
After a hellacious travel day, Tran said the nerves calmed down at the competition and she was calmer overall than at provincials.
“They separated it into a design day and a technical day,” Tran said. “The first day, we were given a floor plan and we had to renovate it based off what the client said they wanted and also had to design certain aspects they told us to do.
“The second day was the technical day where we made a house based off a floor plan and had to make it so a builder would be able to look at it and make a house. So, we had to do a lot of annotations, measurements.”
In between provincials and nationals, Tran did extensive preparatory work, including hopping on calls with professionals in the industry and the Alberta judges.
Wyzykoski prepared by studying theory, adding he got to a point with bread-boarding and soldering where you can’t practice any more and it’s about being mentally ready to compete.
“There wasn’t much documentation on what nationals was supposed to be,” Wyzykoski said. “It outlined each of the sections, but for the most part I was going in blind a little bit.
“It was the same concepts as provincials, just applied in different ways.”
The electronics competition was broken down into four sections: fault finding and measurement, bread-boarding, soldering, and logic gates and rework.
“The bread-boarding was a monster, even the judge admitted he was a little harsh with the project,” he said. “But the biggest difference was you had less time, so it became a time-management game and then there was theory sprinkled into each section.”
The video production team of Grade 12s Kiyan Karimaghaei and Wynn Brown finished fourth in the competition.
“It (shows) we’re on the right track as far as setting up the program,” said Lee Bannister, teacher in the CTS department at Foothills Composite. “It’s been a couple of years since I started the program and they were the second group from start to finish, Grade 10 to 12.
“We can see next year more people wanting to do architecture, more people wanting to do electronics so you kind of get that ball rolling.”
Bannister, who competed in Skills robotics in his youth, has seen first-hand the impact of those kind of accolades.
“When I did it in 2001, it was huge, all of a sudden everyone wanted to talk to you, interview you,” he said. “You didn’t have to fire your resume into a void. It’s going to be huge for them.”
Tran is headed to SAIT to study architecture while Wyzykoski will be taking what he learned with him into the performing arts.
“I know they’ll never forget it,” the teacher added.
