One of new Student Life Director Donna Walls’ largest initiatives coming into her new position was the establishment of a First Lego League Robotics team in the Middle school, having successfully launched a top-performing Lego League team in her previous position at Classical Conversations. This was not, however, an easy task: collect a group of 7-10 middle schoolers, all with no Lego robotics or competition experience,  and bring them to a tournament with hopes of competing with many schools and established programs who have been battling in lego competitions for ten to twenty years in some cases. Not only that, but do it in a little over seven weeks, as the club needed to be opened and filled with students, and practice kits ordered prior to the first robotics program being written.

What transpired in those seven weeks was the transformation of a group of young and inexperienced middle schoolers into a team that would rise as high as second place in a field of over a dozen experienced teams, ultimately settling into third overall. The key to the top finish was a fantastic run of three consecutive successful missions in which programmers Connor Sullivan, Joel Duval and Bekah Kish successfully placed and sent their robots onto the field, ringing up 85 total points.

Guided by two or more adult Coaches, FIRST LEGO League teams (up to 10 members, ages 9-14) research a real-world problem such as food safety, recycling, energy, etc., and are challenged to develop a solution. They also must design, build, program a robot using LEGO MINDSTORMS^®, then compete on a table-top playing field. This year’s theme was Hydrodynamics and all missions, and accompanying research focused around the role water plays in our world and ways in which we can preserve Earth’s most important resource.

The team, which named itself Eagle Tech, actually had an opportunity to tie the ultimate winners of the robotics competition, the Maji Magicians, in their final attempts at the table, but an issued robot missed the mark in delivering its payload by just millimeters which would have knotted the score at 100. In the other elements of the competition, Eagle Tech struggled, but gained an immense amount of experience of what to expect and how to plan for the additional challenges next year.

With the placement in the tourney, the season is over for Eagle Tech, but with the club starting up again next Spring when the new theme for 2018 is announced, they will have a four-month head start in planning for next fall’s tournament. The prospect of seeing this same team compete again next fall with four more months experience and programming skills already in their pocket is very exciting, to say the least.

If your student would be interested in joining one of our two science/STEM clubs, FLL Robotics or Odyssey of the Mind, please contact Donna Walls! We will re-form both clubs in the Spring and have limited spots available.