Two teams of Morgan Hill and San Martin students earned high
scores at the West Contra Costa Regional FIRST Lego League robotics
tournament in El Sobrante on Nov. 15.
Two teams of Morgan Hill and San Martin students earned high scores at the West Contra Costa Regional FIRST Lego League robotics tournament in El Sobrante on Nov. 15.
The Arez Warriorz qualified to advance to the state competition by placing fifth out of thirty-nine in the robot performance competition. Five of the Warriorz are sixth-graders at Jackson Elementary School (Khanh Bui, Katie Fernandez, Pete Mains, Patrick Southland, and Addien Wray) and one is a seventh-grader at Britton Middle School (Trang Bui).
The first-year rookies of the Bloody Outlaws (Michael Godfrey, Adam Groen, Kyle Reno, Zachary Trauben, and Tirion Wray of Jackson School and Christian Turnlund of Crossroads Christian School) also placed well and are aiming to advance to state next year.
Students had only two months to design, build, program, and troubleshoot fully automated robots to attempt a set of challenging jobs in the competition. The theme for 2003 is Mission Mars, honoring the four Mars exploration missions which will be arriving at the red planet this winter. This year’s challenges reflect the tasks a real rover might encounter, such as safely traversing rough terrain, collecting samples, and repairing equipment.
Every team was given four trials, each allowing only 2 minutes and 30 seconds to put their robot through its paces. The Warriorz’ robot attempted five of the seven missions: safely exiting a landing base, cleaning a solar collector, retrieving ice cores, launching a sample canister back to Earth, and scaling a crater wall. Their robot, dubbed “Rex,” not only produced a high-scoring run for 230 points but also turned in a reliable performance, repeating similar scores in all four trials.
The Outlaws’ robot (named “Bloody Outlaw” for the red dust of Mars) also proved to be a dependable worker, with similar scores in all four runs and a high score of 185. In the field of thirty-nine teams, the Outlaws ranked fourteenth in robot performance and they were also praised by the judges for their programming and design work.
FLL emphasizes the importance of the work being that of the team members, not of parents or coaches. FLL is a robotics program for 9- to 14-year-olds which combines Lego robotics technology (Lego Mindstorms and RoboLab) with an engineering challenge to let kids experience research, public speaking, and the fun of competition.
In addition to the robot performance, participants investigate an area related the annual theme and prepare a presentation on their findings with their ideas for solving the problems they learned about. This year, the Warriorz researched the moons of Mars and designed a robotic expedition to Phobos and Diemos to discover clues to the moons’ origins. The Outlaws studied the evidence for water on Mars and developed a mission plan for searching out liquid water below the surface crust and returning samples to Earth.
FIRST is an international organization which inventor Dean Kamen founded to excite young people about engineering. FLL teams can be formed by neighborhood groups, home schools, elementary, middle, and high schools. The Warriorz and Outlaws are part of a neighborhood FLL group, CGLF. The Contra Costa tournament included the full range of ages and team groups from the greater Bay Area. This year’s Northern California state tournament took place at Gunderson High School in San Jose. MH and SM teams rule robotics competition
