First LEGO League- VA/DC State competition updat

[Old Dominion Heather]

Just checking in after our VA/DC competition last weekend. We had a great time... no winning scores this year, but another homeschool team, Acme Robotics, took top prize for Division II project/presentation. The VA/DC state competition is the largest FIRST LEGO competition in the world, they say. Even World only has 75 teams.

 

Our guys had a wonderful time and ended up placing in the top 25 teams out 98, not bad considering it was the first year that these guys had done all the work themselves.

 

I know some of you all are still getting ready for your state competitions, so I wanted to let you know some things that were surprising, or cool.

 

The judging was incredible. The project judges were extremely knowledgeable and asked the boys great questions. One that they hadn't prepared for was "What are the potential problems with YOUR innovative solution?" They were able to scramble for an answer, but that was one question that we hadn't had them prep for.

 

The robot design judges were very interested in whether ALL the work had been done by the kids, and had them explain who had come up with the concept of each attachment and how it had been built, how each run was programmed and who had done the programming. Thankfully, the kids did all the work on their robot. It was OBVIOUS that some of the division one teams' robots had been designed by adults. The design judges caught that and those teams, who had incredible robots, were not rewarded. The judges also rewarded good use of multiple sensors and were looking for multiple sensor use. Our team didn't have the two light sensors needed to follow a line (team only has one) and so I think they lost design points due to that.

 

The teamwork challenge was fun and that is all I'll say about that, though I am sure that each state comes up with a different challenge.

 

Our team had trouble getting the robot to perform at its best level. They were consistently about 50 points lower than they knew the robot was capable of getting. Many of the practice tables were not set up well, so when you sign up for a practice time and table, try to check the tables out before hand and make sure they are correctly set up.

 

Our guys had a wonderful time. Good luck to all of your teams!

[C_l_e_0..Q_c]

Lucky you... We'll be trying those Mindstorms for the first time this year. Competitions are not in our near future though...

[Tammyla]

Thanks for sharing your experience. It sounds like it was a great experience.

[KS_]

 

Our guys had a wonderful time. Good luck to all of your teams!

 

We're getting ready to go this weekend - our local/regional competition was Saturday, 12/4, and we'll be driving about 5 hours away to the state one Friday afternoon. My ds is very excited - their team didn't even know they would be going to state until Sunday because they placed 2nd in Presentation (so no awards Saturday), but it earned them an invitation to state.

[Sebastian (a lady)]

My kids are really interested in this for next year. It's one of the carrots I'm dangling about moving to the DC area.

 

How did you find a team for your kids? Is there a place online to find teams that need 1-2 more kids or did it develop out of another group you're already in?

 

One of my concerns with this move is that we'll lose a whole year just trying to get settled in and find the right groups for our interests.

[KS_]

 

How did you find a team for your kids? Is there a place online to find teams that need 1-2 more kids or did it develop out of another group you're already in?

 

 

We found our team through 4-H - I had no idea they had a Lego team, or even what it did, until we signed dd up for horse club and ds was looking through the catalog to see if anything interested him.