Core Values

We like everything about First Lego League. We enjoy the idea of Coopertition, because whenever we compete we always learn a lot. Plus, we like helping other teams and knowing that if we win it is because everyone did their best, including us.

We like all the core values, but our favorite, of course, is fun. After that, we really enjoy innovation because we enjoy learning and trying out new ideas.

We try to apply core values to what we do outside of robotics, too. For example, we love to learn and try out new ideas. We love to build and innovated. At school and when we are having fun we work to include everyone in our activities. And we all try hard to have positive impact on the world to help the environment and to help each other.

Trying to draw with one pen and 4 hands.

Teamwork

We start every meeting with a teamwork exercise, even when we are meeting on zoom. On zoom, our favorite exercise is pictionary. In person we love dancing, snowball fights, and all of our team building exercises. Team work exercises are important, especially early in each season, as they help us to get to know each other better, and are part of why we have become good friends.

Team work also means we all participate in all parts of robotics. Each meeting we decide what we need to get done and then everyone decides what they want to work on. Everybody does everything, and we share robots, code, attachments, etc.

Discovery

Discovery is the part of FLL where we get to learn new things. Everyone year we learn lots of new things in FLL, particularly about the innovation challenge. This year we learned a lot about different sports and challenges with people doing sports, and got to talk to many different people in the community about exercise. We learned about the needs out community has for getting people to exercise and about fun ways people exercise when they have challenges (like practicing ice skating without any ice!)

This year one of the things we learned a lot about for our robot were a gears and gear ratios because our system to raise the basketball system was not strong enough. We also learned python this season - how to code in python, what it does better than the EV3 language, and how to make the robot move in python. We also learned that plastic robots don’t like to get too cold. And we learned about errors, and how the errors in the gyrosensor can result in some pretty crazy robot behavior every once in a while.

Learning about gear ratios from our FTC mentor.

These are screen shots of just some of the people we talked with in the community about sports and exercise.

Innovation

Innovation is a big part of FLL. This year we had two big software innovations. We used proportional programming to keep our robot going straight, and we ramped down the speed on the robot whenever we wanted to stop. One of the innovations for our robot itself is the ability to use almost pinless attachments and to reuse the gear system for all our attachments. Our jig is innovative because we have one main jig and attachments for that jig to minimize the amount of parts we use. Finally, we have been very innovative in our app development, using powerpoint to make a mock-up of the application.

Impact

We are the only elementary or middle school robotics team in our county. We try to teach people about our team and about robotics. We usually (non-COVID) show robots at the open house at Green Bank Observatory and at the schools in the county. We also take every opportunity we have to teach people in the community about robotics, thorough in person demonstrations and articles in the county newspaper.

Showing a community member how the robot works and more about the robot game

We also try to make an impact outside of robotics. One example of this is raising money through races and other events for environmental causes, our local wellness center, and to help with high school scholarships. We also recycle and grow organic gardens to help the environment.

On team member helping out at a local bike race to raisse money for the community wellness center.

Inclusion

We are an after school team and anyone in 4th-8th grade at Green Bank Elementary Middle school can join. Everyone on the team does everything, with no one having a particular specialty. All of our decisions are made as a group, with the best ideas going forward, regardless of whose idea it was.

Fun

We have a lot of fun together. Our favorite activities this year include: dancing and listening to each other’s music, all our team building exercises, playing tag and ninja, snowball fights, programming in python, winning the county egg drop contest, and building our robots.

Fun is definitely our favorite core value.