This past weekend my team, the RoboTigers, competed at the NEOFRA Warren Delphi First Lego League Regional Tournament. I must first say that the team of people who run this particular event hit a homerun! The event was incredible. Everyone was very professional and well prepared.
With that said, if you are thinking about starting a FLL team, here are some things that I learned after my first competition.
- Be prepared for a LONG day. (The day was great and busy, but long.)
- You get way more points for your presentations than you do for the robot games. (You do have to score high enough in the robot games to move on, but having the highest score doesn’t guarantee you move on to regionals.)
- You really need to do well on ALL of the presentations. We focused more on the research project. The other presentations (Core Values and Robot Design) are very important also.
Overall we did great. We didn’t have the highest score, but we were in the top 7 and advanced on to the regionals next month. For a first year team of 4-5 graders who have never programmed a robot before, we did incredible. I am so proud of them!
If you are thinking about starting a team, GO FOR IT! It was a BLAST!