First Lego League

Saturday was Ian's first taste of what First Lego League competition is like. His team the SharkNados pitted their robot against 11 other teams to see how many points they could gather on the Nature's Fury board provided by First Lego League. 

Ian's team consisted of boys 9 to 14. Ian was by far the youngest. All the other boys were at least 12. He seems so little standing next to them.

I spent the entire day with Ian and his team. I got to talk to the other moms and his two coaches.

 This is his Mentor coach who was one as software engineer for HP. He actually was coaching two teams at this competition and has four different teams he coaches. He loves to teach kids how to program and build with legos. He admitted that he coaches so he too can play with the robots!

The boys got to have a warm up round. It didn't go so well. Some of the programs that worked everytime didn't seem to be working today. 

As I sat talking to one of Ian's coaches she wanted me to know that most of the programing, 80% of all the programing for their different runs were all done by Ian.  She was very impressed with some of the programs he came up with. Evidently he used the Gyro sensor for one of the runs which required the robot to keep to a certain angle while moving an ambulance to a certain place on the board. She explained that there wasn't any other team there that used the Gyro sensor.

 After some time on the practice boards and making small changes to the program or the build of the robot the boys had a better next run and an even better one the next time. They were in Third place going into their third a final timed and scored attempt.

 They boys cheered as one of the runs that hadn't been working all day finally worked. But were so disappointed when their robot was about 3 seconds short of getting to the safe zone when time was up.

 At the end of the long day of competition the boys came in 5th but get to advance to the next level.  They were all happy but have some work ahead of them for the future. Ian has years ahead of him doing First Lego League. He held his own with this group of older boys. He contributed quite a bit to the building and especially the programming of the robot. I am so proud of him!