Volunteering at the Waukesha FLL Tournament

Today we volunteered at the Waukesha FLL Tournament. So did our coach and both of our youth mentors. Also four graduates from our team volunteered. It was a fun day helping at the tournament. We did score running, field resetting, queuing, and escorting. Our youth mentors did queuing, escorting, coordinating queuers, and referee. Graduates from our team included queuers, Core Values judge, and Technical judge.

See you at the Saturday, Marquette tournament next weekend when we compete!

T.EA.M. volunteers at the Waukesha FLL Tournament.

Team Meetings

       Our team is working hard and doing well. We are nearly done working out the final kinks in our project and starting to work on a skit to present to the judges. The Robot design is going great and the programmers are doing their "thing". We will be putting up a survey shortly and we are still researching to find more information before the upcoming tournament.

       Our team has done tons of research and are still researching and learning more and more. We have found great facts and amusing statistics. Such as that thirty to thirty nine was the most common age for fatalities during a flood or that 71% of fatalities were male and only 29% were female. Plus lots of other fun finds.

       Epic Robi is rockin' the field and we have him programmed to do one and a half out of the five total missions we strategically chose for him to do. The technical goals are being met and the guys are having fun programing Epic Robi. The attachments are nearly done and are in the final stages.

       Our team is practicing teamwork exercises and making up team cheers. We are rehearsing tournament skills like crazy and learning what the core values are and how they apply to our own lives. We still don't know our official team name but we will decide at our next meeting on Wednesday.

       Fingers are crossed and we are doing our best. Like coach always tells us, "If you work hard and do your best, it doesn't matter if you win or lose. You know you did your best and you know that even if you feel bad at first that feeling is only temporary because you couldn't have done any better and you will have no regrets."

This Years Team Name

       At a recent team meeting this week our team brainstormed team name ideas and polled to pick our team name. We had tons of great ideas but eventually narrowed it down and decided on... T.E.A.M. Flash Drivez!!! The reason for this is because of our choice in project.

       Also at the meeting we started to write our project skit and we are using the basic idea from one of the previous years skits but changing it a lot to fit this year's theme. Our team will be presenting our skit at a 4-H meeting coming up in a few weeks.

       As far as the robot goes we are still working on the programming and perfecting attachments and robot design. For the past few meetings we have been dividing into two main sub-teams, skit writing and technical, and we have had groups of team members practicing interview prep and skills.

Getting Started

We have a new EV3 robot!

It's been challenging for us with the new EV3 robot, because we have had this robot design for 4 years now, and we are going to change it this year. We have to get the robot to be short enough, because there is a string going across the robot field. With the new EV3, we have to learn a new programming language. it is pretty much the same just some thing are in different places

So far we have had 3 field trips,

• Ham Radio
• 911 Dispatch Center
• Sullivan Weather Station

We still have a couple more to go.

We have had a couple really good projects, but then we found that they were already patented, but now thankfully we were able to think of a new project that looks like it might have some hope! We are still trying to find a technology that will work, we have found a few things that might work, but we will have to research some more to see if they will work.

We have been having lots of fun with teamwork exercises that our coach thinks of. Some of the teamwork exercises that we have done are, passing a ball one person over around in a circle facing backward, getting a big blue ball from one side of the yard to the other, with out using our arms or feet, and we had to do it while we were crab walking, another one that we did was where we only had 9 balls, and and 4 pieces of cardboard. We are getting pretty good at them now, we still need some work though.

The Beginning of Nature's Fury

We wrapped up the end of last years FLL season on Senior Solutions with a follow up presentation to a senior book club. We had previously presented to them at the beginning of the season and enjoyed our time with them. They even helped us with our research by taking surveys we created! We were glad to be back for the follow up presentation and look forward to possible further presentations in the future.

Nature's Fury is this year's FLL topic. Though we don't know yet what the full challenge will be, we can get started on general research. We've begun looking at a wide verity of natural disasters to have a general knowledge of many areas so we're ready to dive in when the full challenge is released. Each team member is researching a few topics and reporting their findings to the rest of the team. Natural disasters are fascinating and we expect this year's FLL challenge to be exciting!

Where will our team be in the community next? At our county fair, we plan to set up our robot and talk about FLL with the general public. We have done this every year since the beginning of our team. This is a great way to introduce FIRST to hundreds of people! We have even inspired people to start their own teams after talking with us at the county fair! We were also at the state fair last year and hope to present there again this year.

Thanks for reading!

Team Number!

We have our team number for this coming year already! ...It's the lowest number we've ever gotten, that's exciting.  :D

We are team number 244!


Below is a list of all the team numbers we have had so far:

• #2659  -  (Year 2007, team name: Solar Revenge)
• #4184  -  (Year 2008, team name: Solar Revenge)
• #4801  -  (Year 2009, team name: T.E.A.M.)*
• #3176  -  (Year 2010, team name: T.E.A.M. F.I.R.S.T. Aid)**
• #4877  -  (Year 2011, team name: T.E.A.M. Temp-Assure)*
• #1544  -  (Year 2012, team name: T.E.A.M. Dose-E-Dough)*
• #244  -  (Year 2013, team name: T.E.A.M. Flash Drivez)*

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

Amusing Finds *<:o)

We came across a few pretty interesting little things at our tournaments this year.

Below is a list of fun team numbers from our competitions:

• #1
• #3
• #434
• #6666
• #6000
• #60
• #6060
• #6061
• #7071
• #5599
• #4803 (Three years ago our team number was #4801)
• #1744 (Close to our team number)
• ...And of course, we can't forget ours! - #1544

Another cool thing: we met up with four teams that started as a team the same year we did. They were even at our first regional tournament in Madison six years ago. Unfortunately, this was the last year in FLL for two of the teams. Both of them are planning to move on as FIRST Tech teams though.

We were surprised to hear a couple teams and volunteers talking about our original team banner from 3 years ago that floated under balloons. They remembered it! ...But then again, who could forget?

Also interesting, the team that won champions at our state tournament, team VHS FIRST (Friends In Really Stylish Tuxedoes), is a homeschooled team. We enjoyed talking with them since most of us are homeschooled, too.

Right near our pit table at the state tournament, team Sh!ft1 had a very impressive pit display board. It was robot controlled! They had a three sided board configuration inside a cutout of their larger display board. By pressing the gray arrow buttons on an NXT brick, people could turn the three sided board set-up to see all sides. It's challenging to describe, but it was really ingenious!

...Wonder what we'll discover at future tournaments.