Cloud 9 at FLL State Competition - slow start - great ending!

Wow! Going to the FLL State Competition was amazing. It was really exciting that our team made it this far!  There were 60 teams in the gym. It was really cool to be able to see the pits and competition tables at the same time.

Our team had all the interviews and presentations first thing in the morning. We had our best Project skit ever!  The interview after the skit was really great. We talked about all of the research we did and answered questions really well. The core value interview went better than most. It wasn’t a shouting match which sometimes happens. Strategies we came up with since the last completion really helped. Robot interview went not so great. (even worse than that) We weren’t prepared to explain why we brought two robots in.  We had some missions on one robot and others on the other. The judges only wanted to see the competition robot but the missions they wanted to see weren’t on that one.

After our interviews we had some free time. We all had a great time button trading during the free time. We walked around and talked to other teams and saw their solutions. Then we headed down to the competition tables and did our robot runs. It was a disaster! Even worse than our robot design judging. We had to rescue it more times than I can remember and it flipped over multiple times. 

Instead of letting the robot part get us down, we had a ton of fun!!! Coach Fiona and Y.A.M. Clark helped us get this far and kept us going.

At the end of the day we were surprised to get the Research Award. The trophy was surprisingly made completely out of technic pieces! It turned out we had an advantage by talking about all of our research in the interview earlier in the day.I got hoisted up with the trophy for some pictures.

Clark also won a trophy for best young adult mentor. Our team was really happy that he got a trophy too.





pictures coming soon.....

FLL

I am part of an FLL team called cloud nine. Check out our website. It tells you all about what we have done.
We have competed in two competitions. At the first competition we won a trophy, then continued  to regionals,the second competition. Now we are goeng to the State competition, third level.

There are a couple of videos on YouTube of our NXT robot and attachments in action. I built the one way gate to retrieve the chair and the dog. It wasn't the best attachment because it wasn't all that accurate and pretty slow. It was still fun to build and I think one way gates are cool.

       
At the competition most teams have their own team button. one of my favorite parts of competition is to trade them.

Book Review #1

I have a bunch of old mystery books from the Hardy Boys series. I started with some of my Dad's old books and then I started looking for them at a used book store. I've probably read 25 or so.  My favorite of the series so far is The House on the Cliff. It is the second book in the series. The link will take you to the Wikipedia page.



It is really exciting and was the first one that I read. At first I thought it was really scary and I put it down and didn't read it for almost a year. I just read it again and thought it was really exciting. If you like exciting mystery books I highly recommend this one!

Let me know what you think if you read it!

happy new year!

This is my first post. I love to build with Legos and read books.  I also love to share what I read and build.   I am excited to start this blog and the new year!

I hope you enjoy my blog.