Woburn Collegiate Institute is a semestered, English-language public secondary school on Ellesmere Road in the Woburn neighbourhood of the Scarborough district of Toronto, Ontario, Canada operated by the Toronto District School Board.
By 1847, when Scarborough had grown to the point where an education system was more organized than the township's original, and a single school was required.
By then, though, the old school just could not keep up with the demands of modern education or with the enrolment resulting from suburban development which had reached the area in the 1950s.
When the Scarborough Board of Education was formed in 1954, additional land for another new Woburn school was acquired for $21,000.
The Woburn building was designed by architects Parrott, Tambling and Witmer, and a construction contract worth $1.4 million was awarded in 1962 to Louis Donolo Ontario Ltd.
In 1998, the SBE ceased to exist and Woburn Collegiate became part of the newly amalgamated Toronto District School Board.
Woburn is a two-storey, 216,634-square-foot (20,126 m2) building on 16.4 acres (6.6 ha) of land, with 72 classrooms, 2 large gymnasia (which each may be divided into two smaller sections), a weight training room, a dance studio, an auto shop, two music rooms, two tech shops, a library (resource centre) and a 960-seat auditorium.
The building encloses a garden quadrangle, known by the students as "The Quad", which has a statue by Romanian-Canadian sculptor Sorel Etrog entitled "Soma".
Identical statues can be found inside the Yonge-Eglinton Centre and York University's Accolade East building.
Woburn Robotics, formally known as Team 188, gathers every year to take part in the FIRST Robotics Competition, an international contest that teams students up with engineers and sponsors from local businesses to develop skills in science, technology, marketing, and leadership.
In six intense weeks the team brainstorms, designs, constructs, and tests its 120-pound robot for the competition, whose objective is different every year.
[11] PEG[12] is a group of students who meet on a weekly basis after school to study advanced computer science topics, discuss algorithms and approaches to difficult problems, often on the level of the International Olympiad in Informatics (at which Woburn has been represented a total of twenty times).
The learning methods used vary as well: sometimes students meet in study groups with their leader teaching them and solving practice sheets or programming problems, sometimes they are taught by one of the senior students, sometimes they work on the problem as a team, and sometimes they are taught by their coaches.
PEG students meet after school typically two nights per week to prepare for competitions in programming.
The ensembles of the music program have regularly been invited to perform at national-level competitions and often make excursions to the US, including Orlando, Florida in mid-May 2006.
[citation needed] On February 17, 2006, the Wind Ensemble travelled to the Musicfest competition held at the Le Parc Hotel, in Markham, Ontario, playing at the highest level, B500.
The most notable part of the festival is that all of its plays are directed, acted, crewed, and sometimes written entirely by students with no teacher assistance.