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After helping my son’s school with their FLL team last year I got the wild idea
to start my own FLL team this past year. I had no idea what I was in for but I
knew that I wanted to put together a team that was dedicated to learning about
FLL and LEGO robotics.
Last May I registered my team, paid my fees and began working on putting
together an effective team.
The first thing I made sure of was that the team was kept to a controllable
size, the school’s team had the maximum members of 10 ( plus 10 more to shadow
the team ). I capped my own team at 5, so I had to make sure I found 5 kids (one
of them being my 11 y/o son ) that could work well together and would put forth
the effort to become a team that would not only perform well but also live up to
the values of FLL.
Once we had our team in place we began meeting in the late summer to work on
LEGO robotic fundamentals. I am no expert in LEGO Mindstorms; my back ground is
LEGO trains, so we started out easy with some sumo bots and simple challenges.
Then as the team progressed in learning how to build and program more complex
robots we made the challenges more complex as well. By the time this year’s FLL
challenge was release in September our team was ready to go. It was nice that we
didn’t have to deal with the learning curve of getting the team up to speed on
robotic basics and could focus our time on the actual challenge.
We met twice a week, first working on a robot design that would best handle the
FLL course, then we moved on to tackling the challenges. Also we had to deal
with the FLL research project; I’ll have to admit that this part was not our
greatest strength. The team did well with though and was able to put together a
respectable presentation.
I found this year’s FLL challenge to be a bit harder than last years and was a
bit nervous about our test scores, they seemed very low to me compared to scores
from last year’s events.
We attended our first regional event in December and quickly learned that
everyone found the challenge more effort than before, soon we realized that our
numbers were in line with the other teams if not better. We ended up 2nd in
robot performance and landed the 2nd place Champions award! Next we moved on to
the Super Qualifier in January were we continued to do well, we stayed in the
top 5 teams of robot performance and received 2nd place in Technical design.
From there we moved on to the State Championship at Georgia Tech in late
January. We held our own and remained in the top 10th ( 7th place ) in robot
performance and received the Spirit Award ( not sure how that happened :) ) I’ll
have to say that for a first year team we did OK, I was rather surprised at how
well we did overall. Now the team is ready to do it again, I on the other hand
am ready for a break…at least for a few months.
If you find yourself in a similar position and wonder if starting a FLL team is
worth the effort, I would say yes. I highly recommend the job to anyone
considering it.
jt
Team Super Awesome #187
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