December 4, 2010

"Keep Your Cool!" with Rock City Robots

The tournament day began with team members from over 35 FLL and Jr. FLL teams filling the gymnasium at Mountain Home High School for the opening ceremonies. Everyone was so excited and nervous, and looking forward to watching how all the FLL team robots performed. How did they design their robot? What sort of attachments did they come up with? How well did their robot do the challenge?

By the end of the third match, the Rock City Robots team was in 2nd Place for robot performance! The team worked to perfect the programming for one set of missions that needed some tweaking, trying to get the robot to perform the task better, to insure that we would go far in the elimination rounds. In between all the matches, the team did their science presentation for the judges that they were assigned to. They also passed out the "Keep Your Cool!" brochures and showed those attending how to scan the code on the back with their phones as an easy access method to watch the documentary video on their smart phone!

At the end of the day, our team was thrilled with the 1st Place trophy for the Science Presentation Award, as well as nominations for six others. The team was also awarded the Core Values Award, which gives them a nomination for a chance to represent Arkansas at the FIRST World Festival in St. Louis, Missouri in April 2011.

All the hard work paid off!

What's next? The team is preparing for the Lego League Tournament that will be hosted by the Mid-America Science Museum in Hot Springs, Arkansas in February.

We are also waiting for the news from FLL about if our team has been granted a spot to compete at the World Festival in April. Wouldn't that be GREAT?

Because we know what next season's theme is, we are already brainstorming about our next research project presentation. What will our innovative solution be next season?