He added that the student’s learn to create things in robotics, film-making, web-design, journalism, presentations, and building kiosk expos, all by doing. But Szilagyi feels the biggest value gained by participants is not the technical skills, but “real-world skills that are otherwise absent from student’s high school experience such as learning from and overcoming failure (in building all the components of the competition, every team we have known has had to deal with failures), to working in a team and learning how to deal with a large group of people to attain a common goal.”

In that sense, one of the biggest lessons he feels students learn is simply to not quit. Szilagyi’s favourite award given by CRC Robotics is the “Never Say Die” trophy (Lâche pas la patate), given to the team that demonstrates the most “grit” throughout the competition.

This year the award’s selection required the most debate among the organizers, because 15 out of 24 robots had yet to score any points after the first two heats. But the determined student teams worked on their robots “non-stop,” and by Saturday every team had a working robot that was scoring points. Students, said Szilagyi, learned that even when they felt like they were on empty, they could still push harder to reach success.

“It’s difficult to dispute the importance and value of the real-world experience that youth gain by participating in program like the CRC Robotics Competition,” said Szilagyi. “It’s still the only multidisciplinary hands-on-learning experience for students, anywhere, that I know of where all the work is done exclusively by students, all in a thrilling high-intensity environment.”

CRC has already started planning the 16th Annual Competition, to be held in February 2017. Registration is on a first-come, first-served basis and will end in October 2016. The CRC is open to any school that wants to join, and CRC representatives are available to visit schools, to give live robotics demonstrations and to get students interested in forming a team and joining the fun.

On the administrative side, the CRC Robotics Competition has also been a nice story. Szilagyi started in 2001 as a founding member, and now runs PR and partnerships. He said because CRC chooses to set its fees at a rate that any school can afford to participate, they’re much more limited in their funds that many other non-profits. Still, CRC covers its costs and has been able to grow from 17 participating schools in 2011 to 31 schools in 2015, thanks to the many volunteers that donated their time. Since 2013, the number of committed volunteers rose from three to 20.