Preparing
Before the tournament, the team worked on three different areas:
- their project;
- building the lego (including designing a robot); and
- programming the robot.
Their project
The team had to come up with a real life problem involving water and a solution for it. The problem they chose was people having to pay groundwater charges to take away grey water and then pay for water to flush toilets. Their solution was to catch the rainwater, filter it and use it for toilets.
Building the lego
We spend many hours (and weeks) following the instructions to make all of the models for the challenges and work out what our robot needed to be able to do to complete the challenges.
Programming the robot
Once our robot was ready, we had to programme it to complete the different tasks. We chose to try the filter, water well and pump addition challenges. We also looked at the pipe replacement challenge, but didn't quite finish the programming.
Thanks
We were also very lucky to have mentors from Ultra Electonics coming in to help us in class, Ross, John and Kev. They helped us to work on our project, build our lego, program the robot and supported us at the tournament.
Our VSA kindly funded t-shirts to help us to feel like a 'real team'; they featured a version of our logo and our names.
Finally thank you to Vivien, from Vivvy Lees in Whitehaven, for transforming our logo into the final version and producing our wonderful t-shirts.
Here are some of the photographs of us preparing.
Competing
On Wednesday 17th January, we went to St Bees school to compete in our regional tournament. There were 12 teams taking part from local primary and secondary schools. In the morning we had three goes at the robot challenge against other teams (along with some extra refining of our programming between rounds). Our robot did really well, competing two challenges completely and nearly completing a third.
In the afternoon we were interviewed about our robot, then we presented our project to a group of judges before being tested on our Core Values.
The feedback we received from the judges was wonderful and we won the category of 'Core Values'!
All of the children worked really hard as a group and were a credit to themselves and the school.
We won the trophy for the Core Values. The FIRST Lego League website explains the core values as (from http://www.firstlegoleague.org/about-fll#block-block-13):
Core Values
The FIRST LEGO League Core Values are the cornerstones of the program. They are among the fundamental elements that distinguish FIRST LEGO League from other programs of its kind. By embracing the Core Values, participants learn that friendly competition and mutual gain are not separate goals, and that helping one another is the foundation of teamwork.
- We are a team.
- We do the work to find solutions with guidance from our coaches and mentors.
- We know our coaches and mentors don't have all the answers; we learn together.
- We honor the spirit of friendly competition.
- What we discover is more important than what we win.
- We share our experiences with others.
- We display Gracious Professionalism® and Coopertition® in everything we do.
- We have FUN!