St. Stephen CSS Royals Robotics wins Ontario Tech University Robotics Competition for third time

Dec. 5, 2025

Five teams from St. Stephen Catholic Secondary School in Bowmanville travelled to Ontario Tech University in Oshawa on Nov. 15 to compete in the 18th Ontario Tech University (OTU) Robotics Competition. 

Royals Robotics won the competition in 2022 and 2024 and were hoping to win first place in 2025.

The deep learning project started back in 2013 with OTU Engineering Outreach and students in Computer Science classes at St Stephen learn to program Lego NXT and EV3 robots using object-oriented programming Java LeJos libraries. 

It took almost a decade to improve the design and coding of the robots. Royals Robotics is linked to an after school program, ICEGroup, which got its name from the old Computer Engineering curriculum from 2001. 

Students who are interested in PC gaming, coding, 3D printing and robotics meet every Wednesday after school in Room 2059.

This year, IceGroup 1 (Team 51) (Sanjeay Premraj, Joshua Clark, Lucas Dwyer and Mikayla Colquhoun) built an amazing robot and programmed it with Java to win the robotics competition.

The new Grade 10 team, IceGroup 5 (Team 55) placed 10th out of 74 teams and are looking forward to improving on their results next year. 

The Grade 11 teams learned a lot from their battles and have a 5 hour livestream on Youtube to revisit how design and programming of sensors and motors can improve next year.

Royals Robotics wants to thank the school, PVNC Catholic, OTU Engineering Outreach, Java LeJos, Lego and all of our partners for a great learning experience.

Many of our competitors have gone on to pursue engineering after high school and we’d like to think that this event helps them confirm their pathway.