FLL Kickoff

 Three Wake Robotics FLL teams got together for the FLL season kickoff!! All summer long, we studied about Natural Disasters to get ready for Natures Fury. Everybody was excited that kickoff and the beginning of the season were finally here!!!

At the kickoff, everyone ate lunch together and did fun team building activities outside! Then, it was finally time to watch the videos.  One video explained the missions for the robot and the other explained the project challenge for the season. We were glad to finally find out what Nature's Fury means. After the videos we broke into groups and started working on building the LEGO mission models for the robot table. I think that this table is going to be the funnest one yet! Our YAM (young adult mentor) agrees and he's been doing FLL for a long time.

Here is a link to the YouTube video that explains the robot game for this year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hb5xj0FUSPY&feature=youtu.be

and this link will tell you all about the upcoming season!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrfKwW71xYs

FRC Team Pyrotech Wins 2nd Highest Award

My FLL team, Cloud 9, is sponsored by Wake Robotics. So is PyroTech, an FRC team. Our teams see each other a lot because we meet in the same place. In fact, some team members of PyroTech mentored our team! So, I was really excited about going to go cheer them on at Regional qualifier! Their robot was really cool. It had to shoot Frisbees and climb. The competition name is ultimate ascent. Watch this video to see how it works. 

Everybody was standing in front of me so I didn't get a bunch of great pictures.

The team won the second highest award called Engineering Inspiration.  I got to help in some of the outreach activities that their team did. I think that the outreach things are a good part of FIRST because you get to practice public speaking and you get to show everybody about what robotics and engineering is like. Doing outreach with an older and experienced team helps newer teams out because it helps them see what to do and gives the newer team someone to look up to.

The team is going to the World competition in Saint Louis in April.  They are looking for donations to help for traveling to Saint Louis. Please help PyroTech go to World!!! Go to the Wake Robotics website and click donate. PyroTech is AMAZING! If you want to know more about team PyroTech watch this video.

They are also selling cool LED lightbulbs and necklaces made from the actual robot from last year.

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.