The story goes that I signed up to be a Lego First assistant coach at Emma's school. She joined of course. That began two months of intense and busy activity on our part while meeting two, three, and then five times a week to prepare for the Lego First Competition. Our school had two teams, the boys with Auto Gears, and the girls (which I was assigned to) the RoboGirls.
If you don't know anything about Lego First Clubs (which as of last year I didn't either), they build a lego robot that has to be programmed to do tasks, they also do a research project on the yearly assigned theme, and they learn to work as a team together to pass fun tests.
Here is our robot. The Girls named her Evee - which isn't that creative since the kit is labeled EV3. As you can see it has a computer module, touch and color sensors, a hook for grabbing (which we just couldn't get to work) and a bar at bottom for pushing.
And then they compete!
The theme this year was Trash - Trash Trek. And the girls team brainstormed and picked recycling clothes. They made a poster, a brochure, a skit, and had a blast doing that. It was very well done. And then we made our robot but it wasn't as well done. The day before competition the programming sub-team finally was able to program it to complete a few missions. That was cutting it pretty close. But its our first year and we plan to do better next year.
Our competition was at Lakeshore Tech College near Sheboygan. It was all day and so awesome! You show up, they assign you a table to set up displays, give you certain times when you compete or are judged and let you wander and explore.
Our girls all ready and waiting to be escorted to the Presentation room. I love that Emma held the poster upside down.
The girls at work. And coaches couldn't give hints or any kind of cues. They did it all on their own. The silver robot was teaching girls how to recycle a trash bag full of clothes.
Emma was the trash bag.
Practicing before the competition. The whole day had large breaks between judging venues where teams could work on their robot. To our credit, our girls added a mission and successfully pushed a truck on the lego board to load trash (legos). All during the downtime. But man, when the robot competition began, it was go, go, go! Each team had two and a half minutes for their robot to complete as many task as possible. Tasks could be picking up lego and moving it, pushing something, pulling something, turning something. Ours could do four tasks for 217 points. The really good robots got over 357 points. (two teams tied) and the winner last year got 850 points! That is an awesome youtube video to watch. Two teams competed at a time, on one side of the room while the other side set up or exited. And they did that for three hours straight.
This is the Robo Girls first set. They did well but didn't get the last program started in time.
And downstairs they had the Robotics League (high school) competing or at least showing off. So many cool robots down there. Their challenge was to stack containers and trash cans with big robots. Their tasks included flinging exercise balls to knock down other stacks, stack rubbermaid containers, put a trash can on top. Lift the can up to the fence high enough that a person could put a noodle in it for extra points, and fling noodles in the paths of other robots. They had eight robots out there, this one had decorative lights and they let the girls team drive it! Emma picked up a trash can and moved it to the window.
And the had the Lego First Tech teams which build 18 inch high or wide or tall robots. They had to climb a fence, move balls and blocks, and switch levers. They were pretty cool themselves.
Another design, they were so unique!
Our girls placed 17 out of 40 teams and won the spirit award. They were so cute when competing and had such good manners and were so supportive toward each other. Yay for them!
1 comments:
How fun!
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