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I work for Innovation First International (IFI) in our Canadian office. Here I oversee all VEX Robotics operations and doings in Canada. I have other responsibilities including supporting IFI’s other businesses in Canada, Rack Solutions and Hexbug. The highlight of my job is being the Chairman of Game Design Committees for both the VEX Robotics Competition and the new VEX IQ Challenge. I’m responsible for coordinating and participating in the development of both games, and I am also the primary author of both game manuals. In a nutshell, I get to design competition robotics games with a committee of brilliant people (Paul Copioli, John V-Neun, Tony Norman, Dan Larochelle, Bob Mimlitch, Rich Kressly, Jason Morrella, Mike Soukup, and more!), and then write the rules that are going to be examined and dissected by upwards of hundreds of thousands of students worldwide!

One of these days I’m going to write a novel about my FIRST experiences on 1114. I’m not sure anyone would want to read it, but there are so many stories I’d love to get down on paper. Of course at this exact moment, I’m drawing a blank. All the ones I can think of are all probably a bit too long for this article (i.e. The formation of our 2008 World Championship Alliance, The Einstein 2012 Fiasco, etc.) Oh, wait, here’s a good one. It’s the story of how I joined Team 1114. During the 2003 season, I was in the midst of a pretty busy semester at the University of Waterloo. So instead of mentoring a team, I did what a responsible university student should do, and took the season off from FIRST. (This may have been the only time I was ever described as a “responsible university student”, but let’s roll with it. In all seriousness, this is important advice for any young mentor. School always comes first. You have your entire life to be an FRC mentor, but only 3-5 years of undergrad. Your GPA will stick with you for a looooong time, especially if you’re particularly ambitious. Don’t mess it up by spending too much time mentoring/running a team). I went to the 2003 Canadian Regional (now the Greater Toronto Regional West) as a spectator. I didn’t even have time commit to being a volunteer, so I randomly grabbed a seat in the stands and watched matches. While watching, I was kind of talking to myself, analyzing the various teams on the field. There was one rookie team that I was particularly captivated by. They had a drivetrain with steerable wheel modules, and were the only team at the event who could stack bins, and they were stacking easily, like way too easily. It was clear that there was some real engineering talent on this team. It was the most impressive engineered rookie robot that I had ever seen. On the other hand, as most veterans of 2003 know, stacking was not the optimal strategy in Stack Attack, as it was very hard to do, and very easy to undo. The effort to reward ratio was completely out of whack. The best teams in FIRST that year specialized in knocking over stacks. I started thinking aloud about what this team could have accomplished with a different strategic design, one that focused on game tasks that were more optimized towards the match objectives. Well, the random person that I was sitting beside was interested in what I had to say, so we started up a conversation about this team. Turns out his name was Stephen Rourke, Director of Engineering at GM St. Catharine’s, and he was founding mentor of Team 1114. The team that I was analyzing on the field? You guessed it, Team 1114. We talked for a while that weekend, and by the end of it he said, “If you ever want a job at GM, just let me know.”  A few weeks later I got in contact with him when I was looking for an internship, and he emailed me saying “How are your project management skills? Would you like to run Team 1114?”. And that’s how I ended up being a Simbot.