Ontario Champion Again: Solvers of X & Y Retains Provincial Title
FLL Team 52777 Solvers of X & Y earned the Champion’s Award, 1st Place, at the 2026 FIRST LEGO League Ontario Provincial Championship. By winning Ontario’s highest FLL honour for the second consecutive season, the student-led team qualified to represent Canada at the FIRST Championship in Houston once again (FIRST Canada).
By SolversMind Robotics
Published January 31, 2026 | Updated July 17, 2026
Reviewed by SolversMind Robotics mentors
Why is Solvers of X & Y’s second Ontario Championship significant?
FLL Team 52777 Solvers of X & Y earned the Champion’s Award, 1st Place, at the 2026 FIRST LEGO League Ontario Provincial Championship, becoming Ontario Champion for the second consecutive season and qualifying to represent Canada at the FIRST Championship in Houston. The Champion’s Award recognizes balanced excellence across Robot Performance, Robot Design, the Innovation Project, and Core Values, with each area contributing equally to the overall result. For Solvers of X & Y, retaining the title demonstrated more than technical skill. It reflected consistent student ownership, disciplined testing, creative problem-solving, clear communication, teamwork, and leadership throughout the UNEARTHED season. The team also developed SnapToSplat, an AI-powered platform that transforms photographs into interactive 3D Gaussian Splatting scenes for education, heritage preservation, environmental documentation, and digital storytelling. Winning twice in a row confirmed the team’s growth and its commitment to helping younger SolversMind students follow the same pathway (News Announcement).
What does the FIRST LEGO League Champion’s Award recognize?
The Champion’s Award is the highest overall recognition in FIRST LEGO League Challenge. It celebrates a team that demonstrates balanced excellence throughout the entire competition rather than succeeding in only one category.
Teams are evaluated across four core areas:
Robot Performance
Robot Design
Innovation Project
Core Values
FIRST’s Championship judging framework gives equal weight to these four areas. This means a team must build and program an effective robot, explain its engineering process, develop a meaningful solution to a real-world problem, communicate clearly, and consistently demonstrate teamwork and Gracious Professionalism.
Winning the Champion’s Award once is an extraordinary accomplishment. Retaining the title requires a team to continue improving even after reaching the highest level.
For Solvers of X & Y, the second championship demonstrated consistency, maturity, dedication, and the ability to grow together through another demanding season.
How did Solvers of X & Y become Ontario Champion again?
Twice in a row. Champions once again.
The setting felt familiar: the same stage, the same group of students, the same energy, and the same inspiration. However, the challenge was completely new.
During the UNEARTHED season, students spent countless hours designing and rebuilding their robot, refining their programs, testing mission strategies, developing their Innovation Project, preparing presentations, and learning from every failure.
As a 100% student-driven team, Solvers of X & Y takes ownership of the work. Students research ideas, make design decisions, build attachments, write code, analyze robot performance, document their process, and explain their solutions to judges.
Every improvement came through learning, effort, testing, and teamwork.
We are proud to say that Solvers of X & Y became Ontario’s top FLL team again. But we are not proud only because of what the students achieved with their robot.
We are proud because of how robotics shaped them.
What problem does the SnapToSplat Innovation Project solve?
One of the team’s biggest achievements this season was SnapToSplat, an AI-powered platform designed to make advanced 3D reconstruction more accessible.
Students recognized that people take millions of photographs of historical landmarks, archaeological sites, natural habitats, classrooms, engineering projects, and community spaces. However, these places are usually preserved only as collections of flat, two-dimensional images.
Professional 3D reconstruction tools can be expensive, technically complex, and difficult for students, educators, museums, and community organizations to use.
To address this problem, the team developed a web-based platform that allows users to upload photographs and generate an interactive, photorealistic 3D scene using 3D Gaussian Splatting technology.
The completed scene can be explored through a web browser, creating potential applications in:
Archaeological and cultural heritage documentation
STEM education
Environmental monitoring
Engineering and construction records
Museum exhibitions
Community history
Interactive digital storytelling
Through the project, students explored artificial intelligence, computer vision, software engineering, user experience design, web development, and 3D visualization. They transformed an emerging technology into a practical tool that could benefit schools, researchers, museums, and communities.
How did the team help younger SolversMind students?
This season, the team’s journey became bigger than its own competition results.
Members of Solvers of X & Y helped their coach support four younger SolversMind FLL teams. They shared their experience, answered questions, demonstrated engineering methods, encouraged younger students, and helped new teams build confidence.
Four SolversMind teams advanced to the Ontario Provincial Championship, and all five teams earned awards at their regional tournaments.
Winning awards is not everything, but these achievements showed that the program was moving in the right direction. They demonstrated that student ownership matters and that young people can inspire other young people.
The students were shaped by FIRST LEGO League. As they approached the end of their own FLL journey, they wanted to pass their knowledge, confidence, and passion to the next generation.
That is how a strong team becomes a lasting legacy.
Why does winning twice in a row matter?
A single successful season can result from a strong robot, a great project, or an especially talented group of students.
Winning the Ontario Champion’s Award in two consecutive seasons requires something more: consistency.
The team needed to respond to a completely new theme, new robot missions, a new Innovation Project challenge, and higher expectations. Students could not simply repeat what worked the previous year. They needed to learn new technologies, develop new strategies, improve their engineering process, and continue growing as presenters and leaders.
The second championship confirmed that the team’s success was built on a repeatable process:
Students take responsibility for meaningful work.
Designs are tested and improved repeatedly.
Every team member contributes.
Technical achievement is balanced with communication and Core Values.
Experienced students help newer students grow.
Success is measured by learning and impact, not only trophies.
The title was retained, but the students did not remain the same. They became stronger engineers, researchers, programmers, communicators, mentors, and leaders.
What happened next at the FIRST Championship?
Winning the Ontario Champion’s Award qualified Solvers of X & Y to represent Ontario and Canada at the 2026 FIRST Championship in Houston.
It was the team’s second consecutive appearance on the world stage. In 2025, Solvers of X & Y was recognized as an Innovation Project Award Finalist for its seaweed-based biodegradable plastic solution.
In 2026, the team earned the Robot Design Finalist Award (FIRSTInspires), gaining international recognition in a different area of FIRST LEGO League. The result demonstrated the team’s balanced development across innovation, programming, mechanical design, strategy, testing, and technical communication.
Twice in a row, Solvers of X & Y became Ontario Champion 1st Place.
Twice in a row, the team represented Canada at the FIRST Championship.
And twice in a row, these young innovators returned home with international recognition.
Congratulations to FLL Team 52777 Solvers of X & Y.
Title retained. Legacy continued. Ontario Champion again, and ready to inspire the next generation.
Mentored by Solvers of X & Y, young SolversMind FLL team, the Future Solvers, celebrates their Alliance Challenge Award at the 2026 Ontario Championship
Tags:
Solvers of X & Y, FLL Team 52777, Ontario Champion, Champion’s Award, FIRST LEGO League, Renee Zhang, SnapToSplat, 3D Gaussian Splatting, 3DGS, artificial intelligence, computer vision, Innovation Project, Robot Design, Robot Performance, Core Values, FIRST Championship, student-led robotics, Aurora robotics, Ontario robotics, STEM education