Lego Crusaders

As I mentioned in my August post on the new school year, Cornflower and a few friends formed an FIRST Lego League (FLL) team with the intent to learn about building, programming, problem solving tasks with an NXT microprocessor run robot that they would build. They came up with a team name - LEGO Crusaders and drafted a logo design which they asked Cornflower's granddaddy to draw for them as a logo and which he did with awesome results.

Additionally, in September we were doing a lot of research around the FLL challenge for this year - Climate Connections. As a rookie team, we went in not sure if we would actually follow through with competing or keep it more at a club learning level. August and September were spent learning everything about robot building and programming from the ground up. Then the team went to their first scrimmage in October. The robot performed well and the team even programmed on the fly. Much to their surprise and excitement their robot's scores where the best at the scrimmage. They were bitten by the competition bug and eagerly began preparing for the Regional Qualifier in December. At this competition, the teams would be judged in 4 categories: Robot Performance, Research Presentation, Technical Presentation, and Teamwork/Gracious Professionalism.

We were fortunate to have our team mentored by a couple of veteran coaches/teams and a veteran FLL team member who now does FTC. Our team spent the month of November not only working on the robot and programming but going on field trips and emailing and visiting experts in the field on their research topic - Managing mosquito populations to reduce risks of serious diseases. The team contacted city and state officials, state and university researchers and visited a wastewater treatment plant, a power plant and a university research site for West Nile Virus study. They then had to take what they had learned and come up with a presentation format to share their research with people in our area and with FLL judges at competitions.


All their hard work paid off at Regional competition where they were awarded two trophies: 1st in the Research category and 2nd Overall (which meant they did very well in all 4 categories to receive this judges' award). This also meant they advanced to the Super Regional competition in January.

After two weeks off for the holidays, the team worked to improve their team's performance in all the categories. As a rookie team, they were glad to have made it this far. There were 40 teams each at two different venues (80 teams total) competing at Super Regionals and while our team's robot didn't have it's best day, the team did well all around and advanced to State! We never dreamed in August as one of 270+ teams registered in Georgia that we would make it to state level competition.

So, January 31st found us all day at Georgia Tech with 47 other teams enjoying and exhausted by the incredible experience. Well, the adult coaches were exhausted. Some of the team members actually found energy at the end of that day to participate in the dancing (would you believe that they played the Cha Cha Slide and Electric Slide which our KMI kids - three of which were on our team had a great time joining the others on the dance floor!)

Only 1 team advances from State to the World Festival which is being held in Atlanta this year - and no, we were not it! ;-) The Yottabytes, a fabulous team, will be representing our state. Join us in cheering them on at the Georgia Dome in April!

The learning that came out of this whole experience for our homeschooling was amazing. Cornflower loved it. We covered a lot of science. We enjoyed the challenge with friends and we did better than we could have imagined at the start of this undertaking. And, we met a lot of wonderful people who really do work with gracious professionalism!

Three wonderful moms and six great kids made this adventure successful.

There was the mom who with a newborn who needed surgery, two younger kids at home and a husband whose new job kept him out of state for two weeks at a time despite the STRESS kept her two older boys in the game because she saw it was good for them.

There was our non-official mom-coach who handled so many roles to help our team.
She was overseer of our sponsorships, competition paperwork, coordinator of carpools, purveyor of sustinance and was invaluable as a third adult to get our team members where they needed to be AND always with great cheerfulness. Thanks D! I would not have made it without you going to that first coaches meeting with me and seeing it through the season.

And none of this would have happened without the diligent and intelligent efforts of our coach-mom, Caddie and Scarlett's mom "M", who tackled the role of Research coach with her keen ability to organize work and bring out the best thinking in her students. She really encouraged the team to go far and wide in their research and then helped them focus for their presentation. She has been my partner-in-crime for Adventures in Science for the last three (Wow! Has it been that many??) years and our homeschooling in science has been blessed immensely by this partnership. I am so grateful to her and to Caddie and Scarlett for jumping onto this wild ride with us and making it so much better and more fun! I am hoping and praying that we will have further AIS opportunities.