About Us
Team 356 is a very successful and highly competitive high school robotics team at Castlebrooke Secondary School in Brampton, Ontario. Our team is attending its fifth year, competing in the VEX Robotics Competition. The team has received awards including tournament champions, creative engineering designs, robot performance and for strong partnerships between all members of the VEX community.A large goal of VEX is to encourage students to purpose careers in robotics and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields through the process of designing, prototyping, building, programming, collaboration and more.
Castlebrooke Secondary School introduced their first ever robotics team in September, 2013. Since then, the team has had many accomplishments and has improved greatly. The rookie team demonstrated dedication, commitment and learning through building and competing. They faced many strong teams that were outstanding and have been competing for many years, including those with experience from previous VEX competitions.
As a result of countless hours spent designing, building, programming, and practise driving the team has earned many positive outcomes during competitions. They continue to seek improvements every day as they strive for success. Knowing that they are able to persevere and build on their past is only possible because of the outstanding help and support from the teachers, who are there to witness the team’s progress and share tips for improvement.
Team 356 has had the pleasure of participating in many competitions with outstanding results, and each
tournament motivated them to do better. They have accomplished a lot and have grown to become a successful team, have set goals and achieved them; they continue to accomplish a little more each day.
The two fundamental rules that Team 356 goes by are: “Vex is Life” and “DWWGI”. The term, “Vex is Life”
means that they will give their full attention to all aspects of the game and it is their first priority. This is because they know that each year the VEX game is harder and requires much more skill, and in order to succeed, they must match up and prevail against other teams. They have had to work twice as hard to do even better each year. The second term, “DWWGI”, is an acronym for “Don’t Worry, We Got It”. This simply means they will keep a positive mindset and work harder every day to achieve their goals. They just have get the work done, no matter how many attempts it takes. These rules help us reach our goal, and complete any tasks given to us regardless of the difficulty level.
In previous years, Team 356 has participated in five unique VEX Robotics challenges and suceeded in each
game as they were able to compete at five Provincial Competitions and four World Championships. Two of the teams, 356B and 356E, did exceptionally well as Team B achieved 13th place out of 86 teams from all around the world in the 2014 VEX Robotics World Championship High School Math Division, and were victorious in the Ontario Provincial Championship as the winning alliance. Team E achieved 22nd place out of 90 teams from all around the world in the 2015 VEX Robotics World Championship High School Science Division, and achieved the title of finalist at the 2015 Ontario Provincial Championship. The entire 356 team also achieved many other awards, such as Tournament Champions, Finalist, Semi-Finalist, Excellence, Design, Build, Amaze, Sportsmanship, Think, Judges, Innovate, Create, and Energy. Each year the team is able to learn new aspects of robotics and improve their skills.