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!

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!

Off to the Winery

As part of our research project, we toured King Estates Winery, which is about 20 miles out of town here. It was very very cold and foggy, we could hardly see the vineyards. Randy Stokes gave us a great tour and showed us everything from the grapevines to where they sort the stems and skins away from the grapes, big steel vats and then oak barrels where the wines are aged. We also saw where the bottle the wines and puts corks and labels on them and put them in boxes to be shipped to customers. We didn't taste any wines though!

After the tour, Randy Stokes talked to us about climate change and how it will affect vineyards here. King Estates won't have as many problems as some other wineries because they are closer to the coast which keeps their vineyard at a cooler overall temperature.

Here's Our Robots

Here's our robots and some attachments. The robot is an updated version of last year's "Bull Man". We added an ultrasonic sensor for some of our programs to sense objects and walls. And some cool new attachments.

Coach Robin took a "formal portrait" of the robots. Don't they look cute, like they have little eyes and all?

This year's FLL theme is Climate Connections, and our team chose the effect of climate on our local wineries as our research project topic. We found that wineries are in trouble because our climate is getting warmer and eventually the types of grapes that are grown here in the Willamette Valley (mostly Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris) have a very narrow temperature range that they can grow in. We're looking at two solutions, one a design to limit the amount of heat that the wine grapes get, and another to help slow down human-caused global warming.

This week we invited Charlotte Anthony from a local organization called Victory Gardens for All to come and talk to us about climate change and how helping people grow food at home can stop food from being shipped from a long ways away and help eliminate greenhouse gasses caused from food transportation.

We decided that we are going to give away bucket gardens as part of our research project to help people start growing food at home.

Having Fun in Happy Rainbow Land

The team has dubbed this year's challenge board as "Happy Happy Rainbow Land", and we're busy designing attachments and programs to tackle the challenges on the board. This year's missions seem more difficult overall than last year's, and the balls (carbon) are giving the team the most headaches.

Welcome to our new FLL team blog

Our team, "Veni Vidi Roboti" has been going strong since this summer, when we decided to work our way through LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT: The Mayan Adventure . The kids had fun making robots to traverse tomb tunnels and swing on vines across deadly spike-filled caverns, ala an Indiana-Jones-style adventure. Here's just a few of the imaginative solutions they came up with for a vine-traversing robot. The robot had to somehow make its way along a vine strung across a large cavern while carrying a pebble. When it reached the opposite wall of the cavern, it had to drop the pebble into a jar and return to get the next pebble. When the jar reached a certain weight, a door into the next tomb opened. We simulated the cavern and vine with a rope strung across our living room.
The kids took some time to test out a variety of different designs to traverse the vine, from clawed hands to gears to a single gear system like a gondola. Eventually they concluded that the triple-gear system worked best for propulsion along the vine, especially as the vine swung upwards towards the final attachment spot. One gear gripped the vine and the other larger gears kept it from slipping off
Next it was time to devise an attachment that would hold a pebble without dropping it as it moved across the vine, and be able to drop it with precision into a bucket at the other end, via connection with a motor. Here's their final design for the pebble attachment, it tips downward with the rotation of the motor to release the pebble.

And here's their final design for the robot, without the attachment of the ultrasonic sensor that allowed it to know when it was finally approaching the wall.


Here's a video of the final robot in action, after they finished programming it (sorry for the poor quality, it was taken with a Blackberry). They decided to use an ultrasonic sensor to detect the approaching wall. The robot moves forward for a long ways, then begins moving in shorter increments which are separated by taking in data from the ultrasonic sensor. When it is the appropriate distance from the wall, it pauses, as the kids discovered that if it didn't pause, it would drop the pebble while it was still swinging and the accuracy would be off. Once it has stopped swinging, it drops the pebble and returns to the other side of the chamber to be re-loaded with the next pebble. They tested 8 pebbles in a variety of shapes and sizes and were able to drop them in the small jar with 90% accuracy. Extremely exciting for a few hours of work!