23 November 2009

Lego Robotics

London has been participating in Lego Robotics/First Lego League for the past 3 months. This weekend was their tournament. The kids build a car with legos, and then learn to program a computer type unit that is integrated into the car. Before watching this competition, I thought they were just using remote controls to make the robots move, but they actually have to do a lot of measuring and calculating to make these things go. They are given "simple" missions to complete and then have a competition with the other schools around here. The winners get to go to Anchorage, and those winners will go onward and upward to a national level.

London's mission was to have her car (carrying a family of 4 Lego people) through a kind of obstacle course and then have the car grab a ring...all without harming the family (meaning they didn't fall off). From the first picture, her car started on the right on the 3M label. It had to follow the black line up and then curve to the left, make a sharp right turn, go under the bridge, rotate 90 degrees to the right, then go forward set the family down, and then back up away from the family. It is hard to explain, so I put up some video of her on one of the test run tables. Her team didn't win...but they also didn't loose.

Her team had three different missions, and each mission was worth a certain number of points. They got points for how many of the objectives they completed. I didn't get her mission in the actual competition, because we also had two soccer games to be at on Saturday, and her tournament went from 9:45 am - 4 pm!






First tries.



This time was so close. It got all the way to where is was supposed to go, but the family fell off at the bridge, before the ending...lol!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

That was very interesting...I don't understand what made the difference in where it went each time. It didn't appear that London was controlling it in any way.