First Lego League

Since October, Matthew has spent every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at school participating in the Lego League club.  Starting in November, he spent every afternoon except Friday at school for the same reason.  This past week, the school had early release, so he spent 3 hours Wednesday - Friday at his coach's house for Lego League.  All of this time was in preparation for today's big event.

Matthew's team getting ready to race their robot

Today was a regional qualifying tournament for First Lego League.  For the uninitiated, this is not a group that plays with legos.  This is a group that uses Lego Mindstorm robots as a way to get kids interested in problem solving using robots.  Each year there is a national theme for the competition and kids all over the country participate.  This years theme was food factor.  There were 3 different parts to the competition.  First, they had to research and do a presentation about a specific kind of food, safety issues related to that kind of food, and a specific way to solve one of those problems.  Second, they had to stand in front of a team of judges and talk to them about how they work together as a team.  Third, there is a table set up with various obstacles and tasks related to food safety.  Each task has a point value assigned to it that the team can receive for successfully completing it.  These tasks are to be done by a robot.  The kids create the robot and program it to do whatever it needs to do.  There are three 2.5 minute rounds where they try to get as many points as they can.  The robot part of the competition is open to the public, but the others aren't.  So we arrived in the afternoon to cheer on Matthew's robot.

Matthew's team robot ending the first round 25th out of 28.  It ended the second round 23rd.  It finished the third round in 24th.  Matthew explained that this was a pretty good finish, considering the technical difficulties their robot had in the first round.  This meant they had to build and program a backup robot in between rounds. 

Matthew's team chose cheese as the food for their project.  Can you tell?

When we got to the awards ceremony, we weren't expecting much.  However, due to a change in format for the competition, we were pleasantly surprised.  They gave 3 different awards for each segment of the competition, and then an overall winner for each part.  Then they gave a director's award for the team that had the highest overall score.  We knew there was no hope for the robot part or the director's award.  We were all very excited when we heard them announce that Matthew's team as winning the gracious professionalism award in the core values section.  It was nice to see them recognized for their efforts, even though the robot portion wasn't so successful.  We were even more excited, and quite shocked to hear them say that Matthew's team had won the overall award for core values.  This means that his team gets to go on to the state competition!  The boys were all so excited.  We are happy for Matthew (and really hope the state competition is close enough that we can make the competition a day trip instead of necessitating an overnight stay).  All along, Matthew's coach had told the team that all parts of the process were important, not just the robot.  It turns out he was right.

We went out to dinner at one of our favorite places to celebrate.