FLL, or First Lego League, is a global robotics program that works with kids of various ages. Their goal is to “guide youths through STEM learning and exploration at an early age.”
Part of FLL is robotics competitions, where the kids have various missions to complete using a robot that they must build out of Lego pieces that were made for it. They’ll program the robot and build parts to get as many points as possible from missions without touching the robot outside of a starting zone in under two and a half minutes.
Robert Morey is a pastor who works with Coda and has his own team. He explained that, “You want to get as many points as you can. You get points for anything you do successfully, but you only have two and a half minutes, and you can only touch the robot when it’s on base.”
Kathy Claywell also works with Coda and works with Robert on the same team. She explained, “Each team works together to develop the best robot to accomplish the missions. Each team has two and a half minutes to complete as much of each mission as they can, and the kids do the work. We just guide them if they get stuck or have questions. It’s our job to keep them moving forward.”
“I had the role of doing a mission where you had to hit a rocket all the way up, as well as programming it for the mission,” said Riley Slaughter, a student who was on their team.
FLL also tries to establish ‘core values’ alongside robotics.
“It’s called gracious professionalism, where we want to win the competition. But we’re willing to help others, for example, if someone’s missing a part, when we’ve got an extra one, we’ll give them a part. We want to beat our competition, but we want to beat them at their best. We want to do the best we can on our team, at the same time be a help. It maintains good attitudes. And we’re not sinking into a vicious nature of competition,” stated Morey.
And each year there is a different theme and project to go with it.
“Each fall, First Lego League announces the theme for the competition.” said Claywell.
“This year, it’s about generating electricity power, and we have to come up with a project. And the project is we have to find a real world problem, it can be local, or it can be something in another country or worldwide. And we’ve got to come up with an innovative solution,” Morey said.
Once you go to competitions, there are judges who score you on all there is to work on.
“Well, of course, you know, we’re all kids had heart, we’re all always more interested in the actual competition of the robot, but the judges are looking to see that we are all abiding by the rules, that we’re behaving in a rather courteous manner, but they also want to test and see, did operate in our core values? Were we gracious and helpful to other people? They want to know if we recorded our progress on paper, sort of like an engineering notebook that would show the different things we tried to attempt to perform on a mission and whether it worked or it didn’t work and how we might connect them together,” Morey said.
“And then there’s the project, they’re looking to see that we’re coming up with real world solutions to existing needs. They’re looking to see how well we put it together. They want to see what our sources were like. Did we talk to people about it? Did we demonstrate to people that we could add to that? And did we talk to specialists, and get a little community involvement on the project?” stated Morey. “It’s very real world, it’s trying to get people ready for a real world job in the field of engineering or manufacturing where you get in and you work with teams.”
To Robert and Kathy, the most important thing in FLL is getting kids to work together and problem solving as a team.
“Everyone’s input is valued.” stated Claywell.
“I liked the sense of family we all felt in our team as well as the feeling of accomplishing something,” said Slaughter.
Morey said, “Everybody seems to want to work on their own. But we have got to compromise. So we can’t go changing the robot and putting all new attachments for every mission, we put a new piece of hardware on it or a new configuration as much as possible. We try to get them to work together so that the one robot is able to do a variety of missions, while changing attachments as few times as possible. we have to add attachments from time to time, but we want to learn how to make that as few as possible and as easy as possible. So, we’re not competing against each other. We’re a team and we work together. And that’s one of the big things.”