Presenting at the Findley Elementary School Science Fair with V-Cube FTC

Hello readers,

Our team was invited to present our robot, project and core values to students at the Findley Science Fair. We talked to many students, some who have done FLL in the past, or some who have not even heard of it. We also talked to parents and we tried to get students interested in FLL next year. We presented our robot by running a demo EV3 robot with a simple program that would make it continuously stay within a black oval. Students were intrigued about how the robot worked, such as how the motors drove 4 wheels, how the color sensor worked, and how the programming software controlled the robot. We talked to them about what FLL is, the parts of FLL and who can form a team. We even went around the Science Fair projects and talked to some of the students about projects related to what we were doing in FLL, and told them about FLL. It was a great experience, and we thank the school for inviting us to present there with V-Cube FTC!

Thanks, and Go BrickBusters!

-Shane Puthuparambil

Presenting at OMSI to the Jr. FLL Teams - March 9th, 2014

Our team was invited to present at the Jr. FLL competition at OMSI on Sunday! We graciously accepted the invitation, as it would be a great way to encourage aspiring "FLLers" to join FLL after their Jr. FLL experience. Mukund, Medini, Suhani, Shaun and Sriya were the team members who went with our coaches to present.  

We were able to do great outreach to the future FLL students, and we were able to describe our project and the robot to the various Jr. FLL teams that were there. Mukund went around and also interviewed some teams about their projects. The theme was just like FLL's Nature's Fury theme, it was called "Disaster Blasters". The teams needed to pick a natural disaster to research on and help prevent with a unique solution. There were some very cool projects, like a force field generating LEGO mechanism.

In the end of the competition, we handed out medals to the Jr. FLL teams. It was a fun day for the Jr. FLL teams and the members of the BrickBusters that were there. We were really grateful that we were invited for to showcase FLL at the Jr. FLL competition, and we hope to do outreach like this even after FLL is over.

Thanks, and Go BrickBusters!

WE ARE GOING TO WORLDS!!!

Hello Brickbusters,

Sorry for not posting things for so long but a lot has happened between the qualifying and regional championships for us.

In the qualifying tournament @IntelJonesFarm, we competed in the robot game, robot design/programming, core values, and project. We got 152 points in the robot game. It was a little less then we had expected, but we found out the problem and made sure to fix it by the next competition. We also needed to work on making our project seem like 1 solution, not like 3 different solutions. Anyways, after all of our hard work, we got the 2nd place championship award! We all had tons of fun, and we were looking forward to the state competition.

We unanimously decided that we had to show up with our best game, so we improved everything. In the project (based on the judges feedback) we made the skit incorporate all three parts of solution seem like one, so that there would be no confusion like at the qualifying tournament. We also practiced our core values song to make sure that it was fresh in our heads. The robot game had the most changes. We made our robot into a 4x4 by using 2 gear trains, and we changed our board based on the qualifying tournament board. We tried to attempt more missions under less time. In a perfect run, our robot should be able to score an astounding 519 points, and end in the red region by 2:20!!!

The state competition was amazing! We were surrounded by a bunch of great teams and enthusiastic parents. Everyone had lots of fun. We first went to the opening ceremony. Mrs. Cathy Swider gave us all we needed to know about what the teams were expected to do, and then we headed to our first robot run. Mukund and I made a mistake on the placement of the robot because the walls were different then ours. When we ran our missions, we failed to get the pets, so we lost a ton of points. We were determined to do better next time. In the second robot run, our robot performed perfectly, until the airplane blocked the robot on its movement towards the red region. Next was the robot design judging. We talked to two experienced judges who asked us a lot about programming and strategically placing physical features on the robot. I talked to the programming expert with Suhani. We explained our favorite missions, light alignment, and the light calibration programs. It was nice to talk to someone knowledgable about robotics. He was impressed with our robot, and he could identify where and when we placed our line alignment program. It was my favorite part of the competition, other then the robot run. Then we went to the project and core values judging. We had worked harder on our core values, due to negative feedback the judges in the qualifying tournament. Our hard work paid off. The judges really liked us. We had our final competition round. We got 380 points, 9th place overall. It was tons of fun to have finally seen our robot perform somewhat in a way that we wanted to. Finally, it was time for the award ceremony. In the beginning, all teams got medals to put around our necks and feel proud. We did not get called in any categories, so we all felt worried that everyone had performed better then we did. We all felt that we worked super hard for this moment. Finally, the championship awards were going to be handed out. Not 4th, not 3rd, not 2nd, and the moment finally came. We got the championship award, out of 60 top teams at state. Medini screamed, Suhani cried, while the rest of us stood "like a bunch of bosses". We all felt happy for the other teams, but we knew that we had tried very hard as well. We went to the stage, got our award and a bunch of pictures taken, and the next thing we know, we were going to go to St. Louis, Missouri. We were on the news: http://www.oregonlive.com/north-of-26/index.ssf/2014/01/bethany_teams_are_co-champions.html

Hello BrickBusters!

Hi BrickBusters!

I have created a blog on which we can post all of our work and videos, as well as information, about our team. We can use this blog to share everything with everyone on our team, get more information from our teammates that we may not have known about, as well as post progress on our projects! I hope we have a great time doing FLL! Go BrickBusters!

-Mukund Madhusudan