The Forestview Middle School FIRST Lego League robotics team, “The 80’s” will advance to the state competition Feb. 22 in St. Paul.
This year’s competition theme was City Shaper. Three teams collaborated to build and program an autonomous robot to score points on a thematic playing surface (the Robot Game) and create an innovative solution to a problem correlated to the yearly theme (the Project), all while guided by the FLL Core Values. These three elements: the Robot Game, the Project and FLL Core Values make up what is called The Challenge.
Team “The 80’s” focused its project on building a future pedestrian bridge across State Highway 371 near Target. The team met with local architects from Widseth Smith Nolting, Minnesota Department of Transportation and the Baxter city planner this fall to get information on their project.
The competition has four parts students are judged on:
Programming: Judges look at the robot the team built, the attachments that were made for missions and the programming they have made to complete the missions.
Core values: Teams are given a task to complete in front of a judge and are evaluated on how they work together as a group.
Innovation project: Students identify a problem in their community, design a solution, share their solutions with others and refine it. Students present their project to the judge in a five minute presentation.
The board: At the competition students have two-and-a-half minutes to run their pre-programmed robot to complete missions on the competition board. Teams have three turns to accumulate as many points on the board as they can.
The teams are coached by Forestview Middle School teachers Layne Danielson and Brian Stark.
