On the engineering side we program a robot to complete missions. Each year First Lego League has a theme and this year was on Biomedical Engineering. Each year is different with it's missions. This year we had missions in which we needed to push things, grab things, and place things. So we came up with some attachments to help our robot complete those missions. At first it's pretty easy and it's a lot of fun....but then toward the middle it can get pretty frustrating, but still a lot of fun!!
On the project side we come up with a problem related to the theme of the year then come up with an improvement or solution. We focused on hearing loss and came up with a survey to send out to those who have hearing loss. One of the big problems that the majority had was batteries. The batteries didn't last too long and they had to keep replacing them. So we came up with body powered hearing aids that run by the beat of your heart, sound waves, blowing from your mouth or bit of quartz. One of our team members took all of our ideas and put it into a funny skit that we presented to the judges.
Now onto the tournament part! On Saturday, December 4th, 2010, we had our regional tournament. Each team got judged in three parts: Teamwork, Robotics, and the Project. Then later in the afternoon there were three rounds of robot runs. First was teamwork, which went great and we had a lot of fun with the teamwork challenge. We had to pick out something that we wanted to act out and we chose an airplane. The second judging round was on Robotics. We were able to show them our attachments and our robot runs. Then finally our third judging round was on the project. We presented our skit and then went over some things that we did over the season. Also during each judging round the judges would ask questions about whatever they were mainly judging on.
In the afternoon we ran our robot and the best score we ended up with was a 95. This was fine by us because we knew the robotics part wasn't exactly our strength. We did know, however, that our project and teamwork part went well and we figured we had a chance at that.
The day went pretty well and we were all exhausted at the award ceremony. They did first and second place for Robot Runs, Robot design, Teamwork, and Project. We place 2nd in Teamwork and that automatically put us in the states competition!!! We were all very excited and very unexcited. We just knew it was going to be another long day!! Anyway, states competition is in January!!!
Oh I forgot to mention that one other team member and I created a website to educate the "WORLD WIDE WEB" about our ideas and about First Lego League! We had lots of help from our Young Adult Mentor (or "YAM" for short) to make this website look good and to be on the web! So thank-you Christian! Our website link: http://www.theferbots.110mb.com/
By Bethany Colglazier
No comments:
Post a Comment