Vance Panthers First Lego League : 2015

After regionals, I got off track posting after each meeting. Let me catch up!

Here are some pictures from our 12/3/15 meeting. Oh, the elusive sorter! Still working to get it the right height, so that it won't tip, etc.

At our 12/09/15 meeting, the team did several team building exercises. For one, they had to build a basket with tape and pipe cleaners that could catch a ball when dropped while standing on a chair. Sounds simple enough. Not!

A weave pattern and using the tape sticky seemed to work best!

On 12/14/15, Ms. Norwood threw a celebratory/holiday party for the kids. They had fun with games and being Christmas trees.

On 12/16/15, I did a lecture on binary numbers. I just love having the kids flip their binary cards to create numbers! Look at the CS Unplugged website for more details.

On 12/17/15, we took the kids outside for more team building exercises. They had to lead their blindfolded teammates through an obstacle course. How enlightening and funny! For now, the one picture, but I have videos that I need to find and share as well!

The kids also did an exercise to save me and Ms. Norwood from an overturned canoe on a river. A hose might do the trick!

We took a break for the holidays but are back in the new year ready to prep and compete!

The Vance Panthers FIRST Lego League team is pleased to announce that we competed in the FLL Regional Qualifier Tournament at Neal STEM Academy on Saturday, November 21st, 2015, and that we are advancing to the North Carolina state tournament at NC A&T in Greensboro on Saturday, January, 23rd, 2016. Woo hoo! We are so excited!

Congratulations to all the teams that advanced to the state tournament. It was a tough qualifying tournament with a lot of talented and determined teams and kids participating. I believe there were 32 teams total! That's a lot of kids and teams! Everyone was awesome!

We arrived at 7:15 AM to check-in and quickly found our pit area in the school cafeteria. Wonderful excitement! The schedule for the day had us doing two robot practice runs at 8:30 AM and 9 AM and then moving on to Robot Design review at 10 AM, the Core Values interview at 10:15 AM, and our Project Presentation at 10:30 am. Boom, boom, boom! It was fast and furious! In our spare time, we practiced the presentation, reviewed core values questions, and discussed the results of our robot test runs.

When we weren't prepping, the kids took some time to visit other pits and exchnage the traditional buttons. The kids were quite pleased with their collection!

Here is a video of our 8:30 AM practice run.

This video shows us practicing our presentation.

Here are a few pictures as we waited to do our interviews. The coaches tried not to peek, but it was hard!

Before the afternoon robot performance runs, we participated in the team parade. Boy was it "festive" as we waited to walk in!

We were disappointed to miss the composter button on our first robot run. We scored a somewhat disappointing 189 pts. We were hoping to get 250 or even 300+

The second run was much better with a score of 261. We were feeling much better about that but still hoping to hit the composter button and have all our missions run correctly at one time.

Our third run was back down to 211 (?). We had some trouble with putting a person in the sorting area and retrieving Valuables correctly. I was so proud that we maintained our composure anyway.

I want to take a minute to applaud the bravery that Luke and Zoe showed running the robot for the team in the midst of that huge crowd. The team thanks you! You guys did a great job representing the team!

As we prepare for state, we will work to get more consistency with our robot missions and see if we can speed things up to add some other missions. The team has great ideas on how to run the Sorter and picked up some tips on the Power Station watching other teams at regionals.

I am sure that we will fine tune the presentation and continue to practice core values as well.

A huge thanks to team RUN DMS for helping us out between robot performance runs 2 and 3. They helped us modify the attachment to push the compost button so that it stuck out farther to the right and had a much better chance of hitting the button. What a great display of gracious professionalism!

While waiting for the awards ceremony, everyone burned off some steam dancing.

There were 12 awards to be given out. It was explained that not all teams receiving an award would advance. We watched as the awards were given out cheering on the teams that won although we did not win an award. We knew our robot score was a bit low as we were ranked 21st. Respectable but not as high as we'd hoped.

Then it came time to announce who would advance to state. They were nearly done announcing the teams that were advancing to state when we heard team 1420 Vance Panthers announced. What a moment that was! We were totally wowed by the announcement!

The smile mixed with tears in this picture sums up the day completely for me...

I would like to extend a special thanks to several people and groups. First, to team parents for supporting their kids and hanging out with us for the day. Second, to Sam and Fiona for investing in our team and kids and coming to visit. Third, for the support of our school. Fourth, to Eddie Lovett for taking Camden's drawing and turning it into our t-shirt design. And, fifth but certainly not last, to Ms. Norwood for stamping 180 buttons and her tireless work helping guide the kids with their project. We couldn't have done this without all your help!

We are taking a break for Thanksgiving to catch our breath and relive the thrill of our successful tournament day, and then we'll be back to work!