Lego Robotics

Last August, when we signed up to do an activity called Mind Storm First Lego League, we had no idea what we were getting in for! It seemed like a fun little Lego related activity....

Well, it was Lego related, some days were fun, but there was nothing little about this! For about 2 months it seemed to completely dominate our lives, leading up to the competition. I think they learned some things about being prepared, putting all of yourself into what you do (or the results of NOT putting all of yourself into what you do!) and the cost of doing something well. They had to create a project idea and present that to judges, program their robot to do certain tasks (and actually duplicate those for judges), do a teamwork competition and answer technical questions about their robot.

Here is our scared little bunch trying to act like it was "no big deal" on competition day.

The technical interview, AKA the only time the robot did everything it was supposed to that day!

The teamwork challenge. They were "judged" based on how they interacted, how the solved the problem and how tall their paper tower was.

Waiting for scores. They made friends with another home school team of all boys, in the blue costumes behind them. That team was one of the top placers of the day.

Running up to get their medals for the day.

The boys loved the robot and are looking forward to hopefully getting one of their own someday in the future, but they are not sure that they loved the competition part of it all. Since there are college scholarships associated with this, there are some teams that are VERY dedicated. So much so that according to Keenan "they are a little scary!" I think that next year we will order the kit and do the tasks at home, without the whole competition aspect of it.

Here is the video that I actually managed to capture of the only time the program worked in all the aspects the entire day! The robots are apparently pretty notorious for being inconsistent but they got it to work through all of its tasks on the first try in the technical interview. There are several possible tasks that the robot can be programmed to do but as a rookie team they didn't go too overboard, and if the robot performed properly they managed to get 4 tasks completed. Interestingly enough, the most consistent one throughout the day was the one that the programmed on the fly the day of the competition!