THE 2010 CANADIAN
FLUID POWER CHALLENGE

Bar for success raised yet again at Toronto 2010
edition of Canadian Fluid Power Challenge

For the second year in a row, one point is all that separated the two top teams at the tenth annual Canadian Fluid Power Challenge, held on Wednesday, May 19th in Etobicoke.  Islington Junior Middle School took first place with a score of 109, one better than the team from Norseman Junior Middle School and only five points more than third place Hodgson Senior Public School.

The scores attained by these three schools are the highest in the Challenge’s ten-year history because their devices were able to complete record-breaking numbers of pick-and-place cycles within the two-minute demonstration period.

“The three top schools really did a great job of not only building devices that could perform all the required motions but also maintained their structural integrity for a large number of cycles,” noted Steve Rogers who acted as facilitator for the Challenge. “Getting machines that are assembled using cardboard gussets and glue to stay together for that many cycles is a real challenge – and, obviously, one that these schools met.”

“We were also thrilled to see the very different approaches that all the schools took to solving the problem’, said Rogers.  “The other 14 schools may not have completed as many cycles, but they demonstrated some real design ingenuity.” 

For this year’s Canadian Fluid Power Challenge, students from 17 west Toronto middle schools were asked to design and build fluid-power devices to pick up a cylinder and place it on a stepped platform.  They were evaluated on a set of criteria including the number of cycles completed, the quality of their design portfolios and how little material they used to build their devices.

This year’s teacher tour, which took place while the students were building their machines, visited a Morrison Lamothe packaging plant in Etobicoke that makes frozen pies. Most of the teachers had not been in a food packaging plant before and found the experience very informative.

Photo galleries of the Workshop and Challenge days can be found
at the following two links:

Fluid Power Challange

Fluid Power Workshop

Special thanks to this year’s Toronto Challenge sponsors:

Sample Fluid Power Challenge Kit
Click here to view sample Fluid Power Challenge Materials