All Saints School robotics teams win Innovate Award at premier event
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ALPENA -- After a successful 2025-2026 robotics season, the All Saints Holy Gears were one of 48 teams from across the world invited to the Canadian Rockies Premier Event, where they were the winners of the Innovate Award.
The Holy Gears won several awards throughout their season, including the second place Inspire Award at the Hartland Qualifier, the Innovate Award at the Pellston Qualifier, and the Reach Award at the Michigan State Championship – NW.
At the Premier Event, which took place in Edmonton, Alberta, the Holy Gears were only one of four middle school teams invited, Coach Sarah Costain said. The rest were all high school teams.
She said that the competing teams came from countries such as China, Israel, and Romania.
Costain said that the team was not expecting to win an award since the event is difficult enough to be invited. She said it was crazy to win the Innovate Award.
The Innovate Award in the FIRST Tech Challenge celebrates a team with imaginative ingenuity, creativity, and inventiveness to bring a unique robot design solution to life, according to a Tuesday press release from ASCS. It highlights out-of-the-box thinking for the mechanisms used in the robot.
Each year a new game is released in September and robotics teams have to design a robot that can complete the tasks in that game.
In the 2025-2026 season, teams had to build a robot that could collect and shoot different colored balls into a target area. The teams could earn extra points if they shot the balls in a specific color pattern.
The All Saints Holy Gears team won the Innovate Award for creating a "pacman like" mechanism to combine the intake, sort, and shooting into one component, according to the press release. The robot also featured a lift system to elevate the robot to allow another robot to park underneath to score points for the end game.
The design features must show consistent functions and reliability during matches. The Holy Gears battled robots from high schools all around the world and ended high in the qualification matches.
In addition to performance, the students must also have documentation of the design process in their engineering portfolio. The students were able to explain their design processes to several groups of judges who came to inspect their robot. They also documented the evaluation and evolution of their engineering design with data collected. The team has also been acknowledged for their community outreach, according to the release.
The team thanks its many sponsors and supporters whose generosity made the trip possible.
"This award belongs to our students, mentors, families and community", Costain said in the release. "Our sponsors believed in these students long before they stepped onto the international stage, and we are so proud to bring this award home to Alpena."
Reagan Voetberg can be reached at 989-358-5683 or rvoetberg@thealpenanews.com.