First Lego League Robot challenge -the beginning!

In 2015 Westgarth decided we would enter the First Lego league competition where you have to design and build an autonomous robot to complete a series of challenges as well as complete a project on a certain theme, such as recycling or education. The school gave the go ahead for us to enter in August 2016, so next we had to get our team together.

First we had to tell everyone about our idea through a science and technology night. We invited all the grade 3-6's and their families and organised some other exhibits, which turned out to be pretty amazing too!

In the meantime we bought a practice kit and got some advice from First Lego League. The students built the mission models for our practice table and a Lego Mindstorms soccerbot then programmed it to navigate around some obstacles and throw a ball through a set of goals, which it did err sometimes..

One of the parents built the table which was huge and we set it all up to demonstrate to everyone. Here it is at our Science and tecnology night just before the crowds arrived!

It turned out to be pretty popular and students were really interested in paarticipating, which was great!

We enlisted the help of Robogals, who are engineering students from Melbourne Uni who want to encourage more girls to study STEM. Here they are with our principal Jo.

They were really nice and agreed to come and help us out with regular workshops.

We made them some robot biscuits which probably helped.

They also brought some pretty cool robots for the students to practice on at our science and technology night..

While the teachers had fun playing with the Green screen technology!

Lots of students registered, the school ordered our robot kits and we could all relax till next year.

Feb 2016 Our first after school Robot session!

Our first meeting was very exciting with over 25 excited students turning up to learn how to build and program robots!

We will be using Mindstorms EV3 LEGO robots as well as a Mindstorms LEGO NXT and will be programming them using ipads. We will be spending afew weeks learning some basics before entering the First LEGO League competition in August to compete in a tournament in November, very exciting!

We got into teams and with the help of our teachers, Robogals and some parent volunteers, we built the robots.

This is us building Frank, the Mindstorms NXT robot.

We then used ipads to program the robots to do things, such as...

Turning in a square..

and this is Rob the color sorter, he is sorting the bricks using a color sensor.

At the end of the session we demonstrated what we our robots could do on the practice table to the other teams.

We learnt alot and everyone did really well sharing and looking after the equipment! Thanks everyone and see you all next time!