Robotics

What a crazy busy week it has been!  I haven't been home almost at all, hence no posts.  Boo!  Most of the week was just full of regular every day stuff - volunteering at the school, running errands, helping out friends.  Yesterday though was a little different.  Yesterday was robotics day! 

My oldest competes on a FLL team (learn more about FLL here).  FLL, or First Lego League, is a program designed to get kids excited about science, technology, and engineering.  The teams are comprised of 4th - 8th graders.  Our team is 5th and 6th graders.  The kids use a Lego Mindstorm NXT for the robotics portion of the competition.  They have spent the last 4 months designing, building, and programming their robot.  Their robot gets points based on the challenges it completes. 

The kids also have to do a research project.  This years theme is Food Factor and their projects had to based on keeping our food safe.  My sons team project focused on oil in our water and how it effects the fish in the ocean.  I was amazed by what their research had shown about how much oil gets in to the ocean every year.  The kids talked about how regular run off of oils into the ocean is equal to, if not greater, than the Exxon Valdez oil spill!  How crazy is that?  Their solution to the problem involves the use of Polymer 403 to catch the oil before it gets into the water supply.  They had 2 newspaper (YourHub) articles written up about them and they presented their project to an environmental scientist and the local water board.

The last portion of FLL is the Core Values.  These values are:

• We are a team.
• We do the work to find solutions with guidance from our coaches and mentors.
• We know our coaches and mentors don't have all the answers; we learn together.
• We honor the spirit of friendly competition.
• What we discover is more important than what we win.
• We share our experiences with others.
• We display gracious professionalism and cooperation in everything we do.
• We have fun.

Our team worked really hard.  They nailed the presentation.  They excelled at the Core Values.  They had the fastest teambuilding time.  Their robot on the other hand had issues.  It just wasn't performing like it should have.  Their robot score was 39th out of 46.  Ouch!  Even with the bad score on the robot end they took 3rd place overall!  We are so pumped up.  We'll (meaning they) be competing in the State competition next Saturday.  Our school has two teams and they both made it to the State competition!  It will be fun to compete head on with them (we do different competitions as my son doesn't do Sunday competition). 


If you have a child interested in robotics, engineering, technology, or just science in general I highly suggest you look into this program!