Back To Work

Now that regionals are over, we're back to work trying to improve our robot and its programs for the State tournament in January. Wish us luck!

Research Project online

We added a link to our research project document on our sidebar to the right. You can find our research project here.

Regionals: Day in Pictures

Breakfast at the hotel, it's early!


Look at all the snow on the ground, it was almost blizzarding on the way here as we drove over the passes.


Waiting for the opening ceremonies


Project presentation comes first


Mackenzie in his costume as a Solar Net Salesman


A celebration dance, we thought the project presentation went great!


Pep talk before our first table run of the day


Mackenzie and Asa setting up


Go Team! Tiff and Rachel cheering on


Both tables with robots going


Thumbs up from Asa


Mikke and Rachel cross their fingers and hope the robot delivers the goods


Tiffany sets up the next mission


With the Champions Trophy!

Regionals!!!

Posted by Coach Robin:

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this one, but the kids won the robotics tournament yesterday. As in got the champion's award. Wow!

The tournament was very up and down for them. They were the first ones to go through project judging, and the judges seemed kind of "eh", but maybe they were still waking up. Regardless, the kids did great in the project (I think!). For one thing, they memorized all of the lines for their play, and some of them (most especially Asa, the narrator) had a LOT of lines.

Then they went on to technical judging, which I think they really aced. Although they're a pretty young team, they attempted a lot more technical sophistication this year, using sensors, loops, variables, and subroutines in their programs. They all explained themselves very well, and the fact that they each wrote their own programs was a real bonus I think. Mackenzie was able to explain to one of the judges his program that used input from a sensor that fed into a decision tree and executed one of several sub-routines, and I could see that the judge was really impressed.

In teamwork judging, I know they did awesome. It's clear that these kids are all good friends and they work together very well. As always, I am proudest of the fact that they are a great team and are positive to each other and to all the other teams there.

On the robot table, their first run was an unmitigated disaster. I think they scored 20 points, LOL. That's out of the 170 they could get if all of their missions went well. One of Mackenzie's programs that we thought operated within the rules was ruled otherwise by a judge, and a well-meaning volunteer interrupted one of Mikke's programs with a ruling that was then over-ruled by the head judge mid-round. So it was very confusing. Their second round wasn't much better, with Asa's program going haywire for unexplained reasons.

By that time they decided to head to the practice room and re-write some stuff in the 30 minute break between rounds. Mackenzie re-wrote his program to conform to the new interpretation of the rule, and I tried to soothe the kids' ruffled feathers. They felt like things were being changed right out from under them, and I explained that it might not be entirely unintentional. After all, in the real world when you're an engineer you might work on a project for months only to have the marketing team come tell you that due to their latest focus group or marketing survey you now need to rework it an entirely different way, or discard those features and write entirely new ones. It's good for them to be able to quickly re-think their strategies or re-work their programs. After that, they buckled down and got to work and their last table run was much much better.

It was clear that all of the teams were struggling with this year's table, which seemed much harder than last year. So I knew that even if we weren't scoring as high as we'd hoped to, the other teams were in more or less the same pickle. I figured we had a good chance of being a runner-up and going to the state tournament, but when they announced the runners-up and we weren't in there, I wasn't sure what to think. But as it turns out, they did it again and won the overall champion's award. They didn't score the highest on the table, same as last year, but their work on all aspects of the project including trying our best to exemplify the FLL core values pulled them through!

I just looked through all of the photos which are so great, and will have to post some soon. Right now though I'm just so proud of all the work these kids have done!

Practice, Practice, Practice

Only a couple days to go until our regional tournament. We're practicing every afternoon now. Almost all of our programming is done, we're just practicing our table runs. Every person on our team gets to run the program that they wrote. Since we can only have two people at the table at a time, that means we switch out by tagging each other. We're trying to get as many missions accomplished as possible in 2 1/2 minutes.

We're also practicing our research project presentation a lot so we don't forget our lines when we go in front of the judges.

Presentation at the Library

We presented our research project at the downtown library. We put up fliers around town and it was in the local newspaper. We took our Climate Connections challenge table and set it up there in their big meeting room, along with our research project presentation. About fifty people were there and we talked about FLL and demonstrated our robot on the challenge table. We did our skit that we've rehearsed for our research project and encouraged the people in the audience to ask questions.

Lots of kids were there who were interested in the robots, so hopefully we will get some more interested in FLL for next year.



As part of our research project, we're encouraging people to start growing their own food at home. So we gave out buckets and filled them with dirt and gave out seeds so that people could start their own vegetable gardens. Our local recycling agency (BRING Recycling) gave us buckets plus we asked around and got some from our neighbors. Lane Forest Products and Rexius donated the gardening soil, and Territorial Seed company donated seeds.

Team Shirts!

We got our team t-shirts and took a group photo. As you can see, this is one crazy team!