FLL - Magee Engineers

In the fall of 2016, our high school FRC team helped start a FLL team at Magee Elementary, this team was all 5th grade students who moved on to middle school. This means that this year’s team was all new students who had not experienced the FIRST Lego League. A FIRST Lego League consists of three areas, Core Values/teamwork, a research project, and build/program a Mindstorms robot. FIRST’s core values including teamwork and at competitions students have to work together to solve this without help from their coaches. Explanations and questions about; integration, inclusion, discovery, “coopertition” and gracious professionalism are also asked during this judging session. The team picks a problem to research that pertains to the game theme. The team has to present the problem research and their solution to a panel of judges at competition. This year the team picked Filtering the Muck, they researched bio pollution in rivers and found a Poly-Glu powder that when fixed in water, forms a blob of the pollution. The team then engineered a way to get the powder into rivers and a mechanism to filter the blob out of the river. FAS engineering helped the team come up with a cost analysis and what materials would be needed to build the” Blobinator”. Of course, a robot needs to be designed, built and programed to compete the tasks on the game board. Students go before a panel of judges to explain the design process and the programing of the Mindstorms robot. Three runs on the game board round off the competition. The best run of the three is taken and added to the points scored in the other judging, for a total. The team competed the first Saturday in December in Oak Creek and the regional we placed 11th overall with the top 10 teams advancing. The team handled this with amazing gracious professionalism after a ten-hour day. Many of the 4th grade team members stated that this was the best day of their lives. We found out Monday evening that the team did advance into the sectionals. We competed in sectionals, in Waukesha the following Sunday. It was eye opening for a first year group of students to see the next level of competition. We are continuing off-season learning on Thursday nights alongside the high school team’s build season this January. They are excited for off season events and next year’s game.