Tiny Clarendon Central Sweeps Skills Competition

Mar 12, 2025

A small but mighty contingent of students and their supporters attended the Limestone Skills Competition at St. Lawrence College in the last week of February. The school has an enrollment that rarely tops 35 students, making it one of the smallest in the Limestone District School Board.

There are 7 competition categories in the elementary school division of the team skills competition, and Clarendon Central had teams in two of them, Lego Robotics for grade 4-6 students, and the Construction Challenge for grade 7-8 students.

The four member construction challenge team was made up of Hunter Beeg, Ieuan Brown, Hudson Lemke, and Ethan Tooley. They worked on a miniature model home project for the competition. Before the competition day, they had developed their project, building test models with hand tools and an electric drill/driver and preparing a construction plan, which they submitted to the judges when they arrived at the competition.

“Our design was a little more original than some of the others,” said Clarendon Central teacher Ashley Conboy. “The students were assessed during the competition on creativity, how well they worked together, and on the final product.

And in the end they took home  the gold medal, and will move on to the province-wide competition, which will be held in Toronto on May 5.

The grade 4-6 Lego Robotics was a two part competition. The Clarendon Central team included: Claire Surra, Esther Ruiz, Flynn Drechsler, and Donald McCutcheon. They were aided by a volunteer parent coach, Alex Surra. The team prepared in advance for the first leg of the competition. They built a lego robot and worked on coding it so it could efficiently work its way through a maze, whose layout had been sent to the school by the organisers of the competition. At the competition itself, the team had a chance to see the actual maze and were then able to adjust the code to it.

The second leg of the competition was not revealed to the teams until the day of the competition itself. It was a platform full of blocks, and the task was to use the robot that the students made for the maze, to knock or push the blocks off the platform. The more blocks the robot was able to knock off the platform in a fixed timeframe, the higher the score. The team had to work quickly to write code, to get the robot to perform the task efficiently.

The scoring system for this competition was very technical, and in the end the result was a tie for first place, with both teams winning gold. There is no provincial level for this competition, so this is the end of the year for the robotics team.

“I attended the skills competition as a parent last year with Granite Ridge, and thought it would be something that the students at Clarendon Central would like, and they did. I think part of the reason they did so well, is that they worked really well together as a team, and they really enjoyed themselves. We have pretty good parent involvement in our school in general, and that helped us when it came to the competition. We also had a few family members who came and watched the competition, even grand-parents,” said Conboy.