First Lego League Teams Put Their Skills to the Test

A First Lego League tournament was held in Old Lyme on Saturday, Nov. 19, and two teams from East Hampton, the Brick Bros. and the Belltown Bots, were excited and ready to compete in the Bash at the Beach.

Both teams had six runs for their robot scheduled throughout the day with time to practice and make adjustments in between. Both teams also had to give project presentations to the judges with a question and answer session following. New this year to the competition was a teamwork section where the team had five minutes to perform a task, which in this case was building a tower out of spaghetti, gumdrops and marshmallows, and were then judged at how well they perfomed this task as a team.

They both did extremely well considering this was their first time competing in FLL. Nine teams out of the 24 that competed were given a "golden ticket" to compete in the state finals at Central Connecticut State University on Dec. 11. The Belltown Bots received one of these tickets. It was great to see a few of the Nanotech Ninjas there for support and all learned a lot by watching other teams and their robots.

The Ninjas will be competing on Dec. 3 in Vernon. If they do well enough, they too could go to the state championship.

Earlier that week, East Hampton’s three First Lego League teams were able to get in some practice.

The teams joined the Rotary Club on Nov. 16 for a buffet-style dinner at Angelico’s. The Brick Bros (in red), the Belltown Bots (in blue) and the Nanotech Ninjas (in green) joined team mentors Christine Owens-Voelker, Bill Russ, Anthony Shelto, Tom Santos and Rotary mentors Jack Solomon, Sue Berescik and Janet Santos.

Before the meeting, the teams practiced making their project presentations to volunteer Rotarian “judges:” Jan Solomon, Craig Williams, Carolyn Bernardo and Alan Hurst.

Owens-Voelker gave an overview of the hard work the teams have done since starting from scratch in the spring. She thanked the team mentors who were present, as well as those who were unable to attend, notably Dr. Michelle Barber (wife of Rotarian Ken Barber), who helped the teams with their presentations.
Also acknowledged were organizations that provided the Lego Mindstorms robotics kits for each team: the East Hampton Rotary, the East Hampton Public Library and the Anchor Lodge.

This year’s FLL challenge is entitled “Food Factor,” and the “missions” that each robot must successfully complete to earn points are designed to highlight different aspects of food handling and processing.

A short video presentation showed the robot teams in action performing these missions: “fishing” (pulling/pushing fish shapes into the base area of the field), “disinfecting” (dumping virus/bacteria shapes out of a bin), “pest removal” (pulling/pushing rat shapes into the base area), etc.

For more information on the East Hampton Rotary Club and to view its newsletter, click here.