Our Skit

We presented our innovative solution to project judges at the Saturday 12/12/15 Wisconsin Sectional Competition in Mukwanogo.

The setting for our skit takes place on Sesame Street with Oscar the Grouch as the central character. We present our idea to introduce a new character to the Sesame Street cast, Recycle Bin Benny, who would teach children on a daily basis about recycling.

Before our Regional tournament, we conducted research which showed that adding Benny's image to the common 3-arrow recycle logo would help children recognize what items may be recycled, and in which bin to put the items.

The outstanding results from our study helped us to win the Research Award at the Sectional competition!
You can still help us with our survey research before we compete at State too! Check out our survey post for more details.

You may notice our team's unique presentation style. The judges have a rubric to fill out and we like to help them by formatting our skit around the rubric! We go right down the line, starting with the problem identification, through innovative solution and effectiveness.

With this efficient layout, the judges are able to circle every section of their sheet by the time our five minute skit is finished. This presentation style has worked amazingly well for several years and the judges like it too!

Enjoy our video!

Visit our YouTube page for more videos!

3 Missions, 696 Points

Finally we have videos uploaded of all three of our main missions! We have a couple more backup missions for if something goes wrong with our main three.

We are working on many updates and improvements to our missions, but these videos should give you a good idea of how we are doing so far.  :)

If all goes as planned, our maximum score is 696 points.

MISSION 1 - 113 Points

MISSION 2 - 287 Points

MISSION 3 - 260 Points

Sectionals! :D

Sectionals was awesome! Our pit table was right between two teams we've made friends with over the years, Franklin Storm and Leedle Bots. Right from the start of the day, our pit table was swamped with teams and coaches studying our impressive programming code. They had so much to say about our programming, project, and core values booklets that we had out at our table. That was pretty cool. We didn't even have our pit boards up yet since we needed them packed and ready to go for interviews!

We spent the morning rehearsing our skit and prepping for interviews. We were one of the last teams to go through the judging tracks. We really appreciated the extra time in the morning. Our interviews went really well! We headed back to the pits smiling and feeling more confident about the day.

We had some issues that weren't our fault during the robot matches in the afternoon. It was especially nerve wracking when they started the match before we were ready and they were still resetting our field! We lost time because of that. A couple other things happened too, but we still pulled through. Our robot, Benny Hopper, performed fairly well for us. In the end our highest score was 430 points, giving us the rank of 14th place out of 48 teams.

Finally it was time for the awards ceremony...
We won the 1st place research award!!!
Not only that, but we were also nominated for more awards than any other team! That was special and made us smile from ear to ear. We were also up for champions and got nominated for it in the awards ceremony! When announcing which 18 teams will move on to state, we were the first listed! So...
We are going to state!

Our excitement level is through the roof! Many of the teams we made friends with will move on too!

To continue our tradition, we met together as a team for dinner at Culver's and held our own in-team awards ceremony with special awards for each team member.

What an excellent finish to the many weeks of hard work and dedication. Now we plan to take a break over Christmas and New Years and meet back together after the holidays to prepare for state. We are looking forward to seeing some of our favorite teams there too!

A TEAM Meeting

Kenneth created a fast, smooth, and accurate line follower. That inspired Peyton to learn how to do the same thing for mission 3. He already had the mission completed, but it will definitely be more accurate and repeatable if it follows a line, too. 

Kenneth always does an amazing job with peer mentoring.

We always have fun with team building exercises. At this meeting we really did some team building and exercise! ;)

Not quite enough teammates for
a pyramid, so we made a cube. 

After making our cube,
we decided to build a tower.

Who knew cheer leading stunts were a part of robotics meetings?

Mission 3 - 280 Points

Today was another programming success! We got our mission 3 working consistently. If we calculated correctly, this mission scores us 280 points! If all three of our missions go as planned, our maximum score is 696 points.

We still want to improve this run by adding a bag collector for the sorter area which would increase our score by 40 points. We're also talking about dropping off a compost collector in our second mission that we would pick up in this third mission. But we're happy with what we have and want to take things one step at a time.

We sped the program up a bit after videoing it, so as it is currently, this run takes about 28 seconds to complete.

          Take a look:

Visit our YouTube page for more videos!

Fieldtrip

We visited Keep Greater Milwaukee Beautiful! It's a waste management facility. We got to learn and see so many cool things!

We participated in a live educational demonstration

All suited up to tour the trash and recycling sorting area!

History Of Us

2007 Power Puzzle  - Solar Revenge #2659

2008 Climate Connections - Solar Revenge #4184

2009 Smart Move - T.E.A.M. #4801*

2010 Body Forward - T.E.A.M. F.I.R.S.T. Aid #3176**

2011 Food Factor - T.E.A.M. Temp-Assure #4877*

2012 Senior Solutions - T.E.A.M. Dose-E-Dough #1544*

2013 Nature's Fury - T.E.A.M. Flash Drivez #244*

 

2014 World Class, Learning Unleashed - T.E.A.M. Dia-Get-It #4889*

2015 Trash Trek - T.E.A.M. Recycle-Label #4889*

*T.E.A.M. stands for Tackling Everything And More
** Our F.I.R.S.T. stood for Frequent Information Response and Safety Team

YES yes yesss!!!

WE MOVED ON! We're going to sectionals!

In all 9 years of this team, this absolutely was the most stressful, tragic, intense, heart stopping, crushing, tear jerking, and yet amazing, ecstatic, wonderful, joy-filled, mind blowing, team bonding, crazy insane awesomely surprising twist of events type day for us. *-*

We were nominated for many awards, won the innovative solution award, and were nominated for the champions award too! I'm so excited! All I can say at the moment is AHHHHH!!! :D :D :D

#4889 T.E.A.M. Recycle-Label

Mission 2 - 287 Points

Today's programming was a success! We have three missions. This is mission 2.
If we calculated correctly, this mission alone scores us 287 points when completed perfectly! If all three missions go as planned, our maximum score is 696 points.  :D

          Take a look:

...and they EAT!!!

You know he's been working a lot of overtime
when he arrives to the FLL meeting with a crock pot full of his dinner!

A fun note from the coach: 

Normally my team members bring frozen pizza or a sandwich to eat for a snack/meal when they stay late to work late. Today, though, Kenneth arrived with a crock pot with his dinner in it. A FIRST LEGO League team runs on it's stomach!

Project Hint

Here's a little preview of our project! Our innovative solution has three parts too it, but this gives you a little hint to part one. :)

Take Our Survey! (Parts 1 & 2)

We need your help ----->>> FAST!!!

We are days away from our competition and we are trying to gather some last remaining details we need for our project presentation.

**HISTORY**
Let's back up just a moment so you understand better what we are doing. We are a Lego robotics team. We build and compete with a robot made out of Technic's Legos and the robot has to do tasks on a 4'x8' field.

......and each year we are given a challenge to solve with an innovative solution. This year's challenge topic is about trash and recycling. After working with a Montessori educator and principal, the team decided upon helping children ages 2-9 recognize what can be recycled.

**SURVEY**
If you have children ages 2-9 (or know families who have children), please have them take BOTH of our surveys. Because we are using the free version of Survey Monkey, we are unable to link the two surveys together. You must go to the second survey on your own.

     Both are will be linked here for you so you can go from Survey 1 to Survey 2.

     ** FIRST SURVEY: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZVRSZ7F

     ** SECOND SURVEY: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QWN628M

**YOUNG CHILDREN**
Obviously younger children cannot read and type for the survey.
>>Please help your children with the survey.<<
That is....help them to read and type.

It's critical that you do not prompt them for the "right" answers.
We are trying to determine what they already know and if our "Innovative Solution" really will help them to better understand about recycling.

**HOUSE NUMBER**
We do ask for a number to be entered that we can use as an ID number so we can pair the two surveys together. We ask for you house number - just the number, not the whole address.

If you have multiple children in your household, please be sure each child's number is different. You can add a letter after the number so that each child's ID is different.

**SHARING**
Please share this survey far and wide ----->FAST!
We need a lot of children ages 2-9 to take this survey before Friday. We will keep the survey open longer, but we are hoping for many responses before Friday.

Thank you for your help!

Volunteering

Our team and coaches, mentors, and families had a blast volunteering at the Waukesha FLL tournament on Saturday!

Volunteering at the Waukesha FLL Regional Tournament.

We volunteered as queuers, field reseters, and score runners. Our families and mentors helped out as volunteer coordinator, tournament director, pit admin, concessions help, queuing organization, and refereeing.

We even had alumni team members from the first year of this team come out to help too! We love how enthusiastic our past and present team members are for robotics. Some of us will volunteer at both Marquette tournements coming up too!

Current and past team members volunteering.
Back Row: Spencer, Madeline, Andrew, Curtis.
Front Row: Avery, Kenneth, Jessica, Peyton.
Not pictured: Hannah.

At the tournament, it was so fun to hear other team's stories and encourage them. We even had the opportunity to help a few rookie teams with interviewing advice and robot help!

Now we're really excited to get ready to compete in our tournament at Marquette next Sunday!  :D

Having fun queuing!

Morning queuers!

Kennth and youth mentor Curtis lead the audience in The Chicken Dance.

We became expert field resetters!

We did more than watch the teams during their matches. We cheered with them!

Curtis pauses with Jessica who was a score runner and Peyton and Kenneth who were field resetters.

We are a 4-H team. There were many past and current 4-H team members volunteering from our team and the former Legonauts team.

Our coach and youth mentors joined us for a group photo.

Tackling Trash Trek!

Hey guess what!?
It's 2015 Trash Trek season! We are so excited! :D

Here's a little peak at our season start meeting:

We like to invite former team members who graduated from our team to join us as mentors.
We especially appreciate their awesome insight when brainstorming project ideas.
They help keep the creativity flowing freely.

Pizza party/robot board building!! Best way to get started.

Here are some of the T.E.A.M. alumni who joined us this year.
They are always there to help and encourage us anytime.

We have a cute little team of four returning members this year.

Click here for More Kickoff Pictures

Trash Trek!

This year's theme is Trash trek! We are getting excited! Ready for our first kickoff meeting of the season. We already have a whole bunch of brainstorming ideas for potential projects!

Can't wait to see what's in store for us this year!

What is FLL?

Have you heard of FIRST LEGO League and wondered what exactly it is? Perhaps you've read some of our blog and wondered why we do all this cool stuff. Or maybe you would just like to get a brief summery of FLL for a better understanding of this inspiring program. 

Well here's a video made by FIRST that should help.  :)

For more information visit: www.firstlegoleague.org

Our Skit!

We presented our innovative solution to project judges at the Sunday 11/23/14 Marquette Regional Competition in Milwaukee. 

Despite being short on a few of our props and a team member, we were able to pull off a successful project presentation that won us the innovative solution award later in the day.

We were so ready to go that we actually started our skit before we even had the video camera running. So since the beginning is missing from the video, we typed in the opening lines so you won't miss any of it. ;)

You may notice our team's unique presentation style. The judges have a rubric to fill out and we like to help them by formatting our skit around the rubric! We go right down the line, starting with the problem identification, through innovative solution and effectiveness. 

With this efficient layout, the judges are able to circle every section of their sheet by the time our five minute skit is finished. In fact, these judges only had two questions for us during our five minute interview afterward! This presentation style has worked amazingly well for several years and the judges like it too!

Now we are working with an intellectual property firm to submit a patent application. We also submitted for the FLL Global Innovation award and are beyond excited to see what is in store for us next! 

Enjoy our video!

Check out our skit from last year too!
Visit our YouTube page for more videos!

Global Innovation Award Submission

Well, it was an intense and busy January as our team prepared for our 4H judging, worked on our drawings and descriptions of our project for the provisional patent an attorney is helping us to file, and getting things ready to submit for the FLL Global Innovation Award. Check out our application!

4-H Judging

Each year our team not only competes in FIRST LEGO League tournaments, but we are also separately judged at another time for the Waukesha County Fair. This judging doesn't take place at, or during, the fair, but instead is judged at a special judging day where lots of event-based 4-H projects are judged, such as drama, speeches, playing musical instruments....and FLL!

 Real FLL-trained judges come and judge us. However, we don't have just five or ten minutes to present everything to them. Instead, we have as much time as needed! That's usually around 20-30 minutes per judging session. It's so much fun to be able to dive into the details of everything.

Provisional Patent

We're working on a provisional patent. We met with an attorney from Boyle Fredrickson and he explained about the different kinds of patents. We presented our project skit to him since it was a fast and easy way to explain our project, including our World Class Question which contains problem identification, the existing solutions, our innovative solution, and our plan of implementation. After our meeting, we got to show his young son our robot. A future team member, perhaps?

Thank you for sponsoring our team!

Waukesha JanBoree

Each year at the Waukesha JanBoree pancake breakfast, we bring our robot and our project display boards to share with our community. And each year, we have many families who come back year after year to see our team, our robot, and see what new thing we invented!

This family has come to see us for several years.

This little guy needed a boost up to see the robot.

There's always a steady flow of visitors to see our team.

The JanBoree Tweets about us at the event! And one of these costume characters is a former team member. Hmmm....which one?

If you guessed the polar bear, you were right! He's also the brother of a current team member.