My Journey of First Lego League
Our Fun season of First Lego League has ended, so now it is time to recap what our team, Team Polaris, has achieved, when we had fun. and what we could have improved on. It will be sort of like a timeline style, so you can clearly understand what our Into Orbit season was like. I will also first explain what First Lego League is. Let’s dive right into it!
First Lego League, or FLL for short, is a fun competition for kids. The competition has a seasonal theme, and it was Into Orbit, about space. This competition includes robotics, as well as promotes problem solving and challenge completing. There are three sections to the FLL competition. Core Values, Robotics, and a Project. For Core Values, teams will have to work well with teammates and other teams to have a successful competition. Core Values is one of the most important subjects in your team. The robotics section, or the robot game, is challenging, but fun. Your team will use LEGO Mindstorms Technology along with LEGO pieces to build a robot that will be programmed to complete a set of missions. Those missions are all space themed, so that adds to the effect of Into Orbit. Last but not least, the Project is when teams have to research and solve a problem in space. Most teams also come up with a real life prototype to show to the Judges and even some experts such as astronauts! You can read more about FLL at the official First Lego League website.
As you might have heard from previous blog posts, I am on rookie FLL team, Polaris. On this team, I have made large contributions. From designing the robot to writing the R.D.E.S. script, there are lots of things that I have done. Now let’s talk about our team. We started back in August, when the sun was shining and we only had 4 members on our team. That time, we only just started working on our robot, and our attachments were all very unstable. The people on our team were Evan, Winston (Me), Richard, and Li. At that time, we really have not done much about our Project yet. By September, we started to research about our project, and we continued development on our robot. We also got four more members added to our team: Noah Henry, Sunny, and William. As the months roll by, we practiced, and finalized everything for our first Qualifiers Competition. At that competition, we did pretty well, but our robot game points was not what we had expected. Only 145 points! We usually could get over 200, but apparently not on that day. But somehow, our team was still the first place of the robot game, as the other teams all got lower. What a relief! We ended up winning #1 Champions Award and #1 Robot Performance Award. A great day! Our team continued after this to improve our robot, project, and other presentations, and by the time of our Provincials competition on February the ninth, our robot could score reliably over 220 points. At the competition, we did pretty well at the presentations, and pretty well at the robot game. We did not get our high of around 290 points though, because that usually never happens at the competition area. At the end of the day, our team got #2 Robot Performance, and Strategy and Innovation award. Well done team!
During the duration of our FLL competition, we not only got pretty far, but we also had a lot of fun working, learning, travelling, and working together! Some fun things we did this season include going to the Ontario Science Center to watch a movie about space, going skiing together, going to Montreal to visit the Cosmodome, and touring Waterloo after our Provincials competition. We also played video games together! (Should Polaris be an Esports team?) We have achieved many things, and probably the most important one was making friends! We could have also improved some things. We should have tested our robot on different tables, just in case there were some major differences and we should have better planned out our project so that it could put up against some questions that professional judges asked us.
Overall, this First Lego League season was truly amazing, because I have learned, had fun, and made lots of new friends! I hope that we would come back together someday and reunite into Polaris!
(Thanos Car also crashed)
Pictures will be uploaded later!!!