Here is a research paper I wrote a year ago about the impact and value of FIRST Robotics. I was on #3928 Team Neutrino during Ultimate Ascent (2013). Please share this paper around the community.
Category Archives: Computer
First Lego League Tournaments…
FLL was my life a few years ago around this time of year. This year, my school had 3 FLL teams and our county 4-H program had a team. I mentored 2 of our schools teams. It brought back so many good memories, making me a bit sad I still couldn’t play with the awesome LEGO bricks at the same time. I wish US FIRST would still host FLL at the high school level. Anyways, Iowa FLL is making it a bit more challenging for teams, since they implemented regionals at multiple locations through out the state that happened last weekend and this weekend. This weekend however is special for me, as the 4 teams I know are battling it out over in Marshalltown. I think they should be arriving back in town any minute now…
I was in FLL for 2 years. I first got interested in it when I saw Ocean Odyssey in 2005. I got together a team as part of my 4-H club in 2006 (Nano Quest), which we did extremely well in. In fact, we got 1st place for Robot Performance (Highest Score) and 1st place for Programming. I think we only did so well, because I put in a LOT of long nights and weekends at my mentor’s garage the last couple of weekends before the state tournament. I also used a concept that I thought saved us a TON of time as well. We only had 1 program with all the missions in it (as My Blocks) and we had a set order of FLL missions we were going to complete. To transition from each mission, we just tapped the touch sensor after we had the robot lined up. I believe this helped us a lot, because if you watch kids, they fiddle through all their programs, wasting valuable time. After 2006, we participated in Power Puzzle, which was our last year. Luckly, I got my school’s TAG teacher involved and she started 3 teams at the middle school level, and has been going ever since.
I just registered to volunteer with this year’s state tournament which happens January 14th, 2012 to take photos or help out on the tech crew (we livestream ours with Extension’s Adobe Connect service). — Click here to find a link to the livestream if you are interested in watching as it gets closer.
Have you been involved with FLL? Do you have an interesting story?? Let me know!