If you read the post before this, you will know what I am talking about in this one. If you didn’t, I can still describe it to you, but for more in-depth detail go the the previous post. My dad and I just got back from San Diego, California, and we went there for the FLL Lego Robotics Open Championship, or just FLL Nationals. We had worked for eight long months for it, and now it had finally come. But this post is going to be more based on the LEGO part of the vacation, not what we did outside of it. I will definitely make more posts about that later. The first day of the competition was made more to familiarize everyone with Legoland, because many teams (like us) had never been there before. It was also mostly us just setting up our table in the pit, like putting up our presentation boards (project, core values) and putting away our robot so that we wouldn’t have to lug around the big suitcase with us all of the time. My favorite part of the day at Legoland, personally, was going to the place called Mini land. This was where they had made small recreations of famous places on the Earth, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Eiffel Tower. They even made little ponds around some harbor cities, making them look like big lakes and oceans, and put LEGO ferries and boats in them. The only actual event that we had that day was one practice run for 10 minutes, which made all of the teams extremely angry. If you have such a huge campus, why not have some more tables and give us more than one go at it? At this point we had no clue that there were practice tables open, so we thought that this 10 minute practice was the only one that we were going to get. As it always does, the robot was messing up a lot of the missions that we were trying to accomplish at the competition. We only had a short amount of time to fix it, so we immediately got to working on it. After we finished troubleshooting, the day was over, and we went to the beach with my friends. Later that night I went to the hotel pool with all of my friends and we played there for around 2 hours. That’s all for today’s blog post. I hope you enjoyed this blog post, and feel free to stick around for more about this trip. There is also a lot more content all over this website, so feel free to check it out. Thanks for reading!
Our Trip to Legoland, California!
For the past eight months I have been doing LEGO Robotics with 5 of my friends. We have gone through regionals, state, and now, nationals at Legoland! We even received a letter from our congressman, Rodney Davis.
My dad and I just got home after the flight back to Chicago and the 2 hour drive back home, and we crashed right when we got home. But going back to the trip, when our flight landed in San Diego, we had to pick up our bag from the baggage claim and get our rental car for the four days that we would be staying there. Luckily, it was not extremely hot, because I had to sit outside for an hour until my dad could sort out the car we were getting with the agent at the counter. Finally, he came out of the building and told me that we got a pickup truck. At this point, I was bored out of my mind and I was really hoping we would get a nice car, but NO. He had to go and get the cheapest car. When we got out of the shuttle to the place with all of the cars, a nice agent who was asking us what we needed said that instead of a pickup truck, would you like a convertible? It looked something like this:
And my dad couldn’t have said no, because who would? First, we went to the beach and played around for a little bit, and then we went to our resort/hotel in Carlsbad, CA. We were right across from Legoland, and we didn’t have to stay in the overpriced Legoland hotel. None of my friends had landed yet, so we waited for a couple hours and then met up with them in our hotel. The first thing that we did was set up the presentation boards because we had our project and our robot design presentations on the next day. Even though it was just working at gluing and cutting out the slides, I still enjoyed working with my friends in a different place than usual. But it was getting late, and California time is later than ours, so we turned in for the night and went back to our own rooms. The next morning, my dad and I walked from the hotel to the Starbucks nearby, and we got a few sandwiches for ourselves (but that’s not important). When we were walking to Legoland, as it was right in front of our hotel, I saw the castle hotel and the rainbow hotel, but not actually Legoland! It turned out that it was in the middle of both of them, and the entrance was pretty small. That’s all for this blog post, but I will definitely write more about it. Thank you for reading, and if you enjoyed the post I have many more here on this website. See you next time!
Getting to Nationals!
As you guys probably already know, I have been doing Lego Robotics for two years now. Both of these years we have gone to State, but this year we reached the Nationals stage of the competition. We had to work very hard for it, but we made it. If you haven’t read any of my earlier Lego Robotics posts before, here is what First Lego League (FLL) is like.
There are three parts of the competition. The project, core values, and the robot run. All of these parts are equally significant to the entire end-result. My favorite part of the competition is the project, because we get to research a new topic every year. We learn new things, like finding out that there are many small problems other than food and ways to get to Mars in space. In the robot run this year, tried things that we haven’t before, like make a completely different robot. Our robot this year consisted of one box shaped chassis and many tools that can easily attach to it. Our maximum score was 206 points, but we usually only got around 120 points. We didn’t focus as much on Core Values this year, but we still did pretty well on it, because in our regionals competition we got the Core Values award. Core Values are rules that our team goes by, such as respect.
In this year’s state competition, our team had all of our presentations before the robot runs. The judges seemed very interested in our robot’s design, so we thought for sure that something good would happen. We went through all of the stages of the competition, and when we were sitting down to see the closing ceremony, we were all patting each others backs and telling them what a good season it was. We didn’t even think we would win an award! We sat there, even though we thought that we should have left by then. But then, when they were announcing the Champion’s awards… they called our name!
Lego Robotics… We got to state!
If you have read any of my past lego robotics posts, then you would know that last year my team got the champions award and we got to state. But that was last year, and after we got to state, we got out of the tournament and our season ended. But it is a new year, and I wanted to do lego robotics again. However, there was a small snag in that plan. My old team split up, because two of the kids moved on to FTC, and one other did not want to continue FLL. So there were two of us left who still wanted to do FLL, and we joined with a team made up of our classmates. They were our friends, so we decided to join up with them and get to work. After that we worked for countless hours in robotics, after school and on the weekends. In Lego Robotics, there are three main parts: Project, Core Values, and the Robot Run. I would say that we worked the most on the robot run, but we tried to distribute it as evenly as possible. I mostly focused on research for the project and core values, but i also helped a little on the robot. But later on in the season, we needed all hands on deck for programming and knowing what to do on the competition day. But enough of the background information.
Ah, the competition. Definitely my favorite part of Lego Robotics by far. What I thought it would be was do a presentation, then mess around. Then do a robot run, and mess around. We already had a very good robot, so I didn’t think that we would need to change the code at all. But oh, I was so wrong. It wasn’t our robot that was making the problem, but the programming. I think it was majorly because it was running in an unfamiliar environment, with the different lighting affecting our color sensor and the different table. But we can’t blame it all on the place, because clearly some of the programming was faulty. We used a different programming language for coding the robot this year, and we used a box style type of robot with big attachable tools. We could get a max of 202 points if we completed all of the missions, but we had never done that before. We had gotten close, and even that would have been good at the competition. Over there, our robot completely stopped working well. That was why our best score was 92. We didn’t even make it to 100, let alone 202!
But besides the robot run, I think we did well in our presentations. Our topic this year is bone and muscle deterioration, or Osteoporosis. The year’s theme is space, so we had to find a solution for it in space. Our final solution was electromagnets in one of the pods to create artificial gravity in one section of the spacecraft. For our core values presentation, they gave us a task for us to show them our teamwork on. They wanted us to write different things in the room that were colored certain colors, and they wanted us to collaborate on it. We answered all of their questions well afterwards, too. Our robot run, however, was a complete disaster. None of our programming was working, but the judges were more interested in the parts of the robot than its performance on the table. We were extremely happy about that.
Finally came the awards ceremony. An FTC team, Ctrl-Y, presented about their league and answered some questions about it. My sister is in it, and she talked a little bit about it as well. But when the MC started announcing the awards, we didn’t think that we would get anything, let alone get in to the state competition. But when they called our name for the core values award, we were all amazed. After that, though, we thought that our season was over. But when they called the names of the teams that were going to state, they named two, and then, miraculously, they called our names! We were all very happy because no one was expecting this, with our poor robot run score and our mediocre robot run. I am writing this one week after the competition, and I would be at robotics today, but we decided to take a 2 week break from it. Part of this reason was because I have to take the SSAT, which is a test for High School, and also because we have been doing it non-stop for a long time now.
I hope you guys (and girls) enjoyed that blog post about our team getting to state in Lego Robotics. See you next time!
First Season of Robotics Comes to an End!
As you might remember, we finished the local competition with a whopping champions award! As I said before, we celebrated for a long time afterwards, and then immediately started working towards State. After lots of reworking on our robot, we focused on the other two categories. We improved all of our boards, and then did some more research on our topic, PFASs. Finally, tournament day came. Luckily, the tournament was at the Arc. That is a gym in Champaign that could accommodate all of us. There were 50 teams, and most of them had at least 5 or more team members! And that’s not even including the mentors and coaches! We had all of our project and core values presentations first, while they were still fresh in our minds. I think we presented well, but we were not allowed to open the liquids for our activated charcoal experiment. We had to just explain it instead.
After getting all of the background things out of the way, it was finally time to do the robot runs. We did a couple of practice runs on the mats that were free to use, but because there were 50 teams all of the sessions were very short. The robot was running well on the practice mats, but then on the real robot runs it was just a complete disaster. We hardly got any of the missions and none of them were fine-tuned enough to work very well. All of the robot runs were similar, so that was a really bad part of it.
But later, a man from the competition came up to our team and told us that we had a callback for both the project and our robot design presentations. We knew that those were our best chances to get to the next level in FLL. We went to our first one, and then saw at least 20 judges waiting for us! 20! We presented to them, and then went to the Robot Design one. There was one mat in a room and then so many judges around it. We had to describe everything on our robot and show them some runs. They sounded impressed with it.
And last, the closing ceremony happened. We were all very sad because we had not gotten in the top amount of teams to be eligible to go to State. During the closing ceremony, though, our team number and name was announced for the best rookie award!!! Even though we didn’t make it to state, at least we had an award. After the tournament ended, we all went home. I would really like to do FLL next year, because it is a really good chance to learn engineering for later on in my life.
Lego Robotics Competition!
Yesterday my team and I went to the Loomis Lab of the Physics department in UIUC and participated in the FLL competition. In the morning, I was very nervous, so I did not eat anything but an apple. Our first robot run was at 10:30ish, and we did all right. Our mentors were there and we went over what we did wrong. After that, we had our second run. We did better this time, and we were more confident with transitions. That was our best score all day: 110 points. Right after that, we had our design judging. We had to tell the judges how we used our parts and in what ways. That was probably the easiest part because we had all come prepared. We did a colossal fail in the 3rd round, ending up with a total of 60 points. Almost all of our points came from the pipe removal and manhole covers missions! In that run, we missed the pipe removal and we could not cross it. We had to rush to our next presentation of our project right after the run. We think the judges liked our presentation because they asked us a lot of questions even after the 10-minute mark. One of the judges was even asking us questions not even on our topic! We would have been better in the 4th robot run if our robot had not undone the most important part of the mission, but we got a score of 80 points in the last round.
After all of that chaos, we settled down in the auditorium for the closing ceremony. My sister’s FTC (first tech challenge) team was presenting about their robot before the actual award ceremony for the people that were going to progress to FTC after FLL. I am going to keep doing FLL for a few years, and then probably move to FTC later on. FTC did a little bit of cool robot trivia, and if you got one right they would drive the robot to you and give you a piece of candy. Finally, the ceremony started. Our amazing MC, Terrance, showed us his extensive hat collection while we were waiting for the judges. The judges came and announced the awards. The project award, the core values award, and many others too. By then we were feeling very discouraged, as we had not gotten any awards yet. But then, Terrance made a sneaky hint that we, Dauntless, had won the Champion’s award, which automatically qualified us for State. We were all overcome with joy and happiness as we celebrated and took pictures. We celebrated at our coach’s house by watching a movie and having some cake.
Lego Robotics #2
Yesterday we had a Lego Robotics meeting like we did last week. (I will be posting weekly updates, just for anyone who wanted to know.) First, we were talking about ideas to select a problem. As you might have already guessed, we have to find a solution for that. You see, there are three sections in the whole thing. 1. Core values 2. The Project 3. The Robot Game
1. Core values 2. The Project 3. The Robot Game
This part was in ‘The Project’ section. We finally chose contamination from chemical plants and factories. We are going to talk to our coach’s friend about this, and that pretty much settled the whole matter of topics. We then looked at the programming software for the Lego Mindstorms EV3 programming platform. It is kind of like Scratch, a platform in which you connect blocks to each other and form a command line.
When we were done talking about those things, we finally started building. That was the thing I really wanted to do. My friend and I were paired up, but we got a very long project. It was 127 steps long! You see, last time I also got a very long project. If you read my last post, it said that the last one was almost 110 steps long. I do not know what we are making, but it will probably work well after all this time. The other two group members finished two or three small projects, and we were both jealous of how fast they were doing it.
That was the whole meeting in words. I hope you enjoyed reading this post, and I will have a new one next week. Bye!
Lego Robotics
My friends and I just formed a Lego Robotics team for the FLL (First Lego League). FLL is an organization that allows kids to make lego robots, and compete with them. This year’s challenge was hydrodynamics, which is how humans interact with water. We have made a couple of structures, but we haven’t gotten that far yet. We made this water transporter or something, and the other two made an add-on for our creation. At the end, our creation kind of looked like a ti-ti on a music score. It had around 110 steps, and it took a long time to build. We spoke about teamwork, sportsmanship, and other things like that. Also, we spoke about how humans interact with water. It turns out there are lots of ways, and we came up with a whiteboard full of ideas. I will come back to you guys next week, as we have meetings twice a week. Bye!