This event is an official FIRST Lego League Jr. Expo. Our goal is to create an expo where FLL Jr. teams can have fun and talk about their journey through the Creature Craze season. This event is also a way for us to come full circle with our FLL Junior outreach because after starting teams and guiding them through the season, an Expo is the culmination of the season.
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Four teams including us attended this scrimmage. It was about half the size of our last event, so we had to adapt what we did. We started off by giving all the teams an opportunity to use the field in order to test out their autonomous code and get individual driver practice. Then we ran practice matches and used the FTC scoring app to make them more similar to an actual competition. The event was a success and many teams, including ourselves found bugs in their robots, and were able to start working them out. We volunteered as FTC ambassadors at the FLL State Championship. We took our pushbot Luna, and let the FLL and FLL Jr. kids drive her around. All the kids were very engaged and were asking a lot of questions about FTC. Additionally, we provided information to coaches and parents to get them involved in FTC, especially when transitioning from FLL to FTC. Our main goal was to get more FLL kids to move to FTC. Other team members volunteered as FLL Jr. reviewers and FLL referees, and some parents volunteered as judges. At the event, we took our outreach robot Luna Lovegood and set up a demo. We also had two FLL robots and let kids control all three. We also talked to many people and described both FLL and FTC. We had the objective of getting people to sign up for the next season. We also spoke with the Principal and Assistant Principal of Julius West Middle School. They were both very interested in what we were doing and was glad that we were trying to start teams in the Julius West community. At this event we helped FLL teams get ready for states by watching 2 of their judging sessions, giving them feedback, and asking them questions. With this practice session we hope that these teams can be successful in their judging sessions at the MD FLL State Championship. It would be great to see them win awards at the state championship!
We hosted and ran a scrimmage among FTC teams, with the help of our sponsors Launch Workplaces, who gave us the space necessary to run the event. We wanted to give teams an opportunity to use a field and compete against each other with other robots in a more realistic simulation of what the game would look like at a real competition. Our goal was to provide teams with practice for their next competition. There was a total of eight teams in attendance: team 7519- Quince Orchard High School Red Team, team 9450 Falcons First, team 10047 Galactic Tigers, team 7393 Electron Volts, team 8521 Hooligans, team 11265 Astro Tigers, team 12063 The Mandelbots and of course, our team. The scrimmage was a great success and the teams were grateful to have had a chance to practice! At this event we taught 8 teams (16 children) concepts of EV3 programming such as MyBlocks, lining up to the line and data wires. We also taught them how to make programs easier and modular.At the event, we brought eight tiles and allowed people to drive around our pushbot and attempt to stack a tower of blocks. We also provided several different informational pamphlets and flyers that detailed opportunities in FIRST and STEM. We attracted around 30 people. While this turnout was smaller than many of our previous outreach events, we had around 20 people who remained with us for an hour or more, and thus we felt we were able to impact them especially deeply. At this event, we taught students in FLL intermediate EV3 programming. The first thing we did was go over the parts learned from the previous training (our beginning EV3 training session) as well as the homework we gave. We covered topics such as using sensors, line-following, loops, and switches. We hope that some of the teams we have trained will receive programming awards at their competitions! William B Gibbs Elementary School Fall Festival 12615 Royal Crown Dr (Germantown, MD) We went to the Gibbs Elementary School Fall Festival to pitch FIRST LEGO League Junior to the students/families. We had one table with flyers and the FLL Junior equipment, one for the FLL challenge, and the FTC robot was being demoed to the other side.. We had over 21 families sign up to learn more about the program. This event was hosted to accommodate families from Gibbs Elementary who wanted to learn more about FLL Jr after attending our other outreach events.
We went over costs, how to register, what the program is, and the skills that students would retain. In between the presentation, we had groups of three work together to build a model of something that inspired them to simulate an actual meeting. After we built the model and discussed the program, we had the Crazy Builders present a real life example of an FLL Jr team. This was really interesting, not only for the attendees but also for us as we got to witness an FLL Jr team discuss their project in person. At the event, we had multiple activities happening. We had 3 tables with EV3 robots that kids could program that were run by Maanav, Rohan, and Shruti. We made up a challenge called “Four Seasons” so that we could teach kids how to program. Kids had to learn to drive from point A (fall) to point B (winter), and so on until they were back at fall. On another table, Anika and Jyotsna displayed the FLL Jr. robot, Milo. Here, kids could use voice commands to get Milo to move forwards and backwards. We also brought our pushbot, Luna, for kids to drive around. They could use the arm to stack as many blocks as they could. They also competed for the fastest time to complete a maze that we had set up. We displayed our pushbot, Luna, and the FLL robot to engage the kids and parents hoping to generate interest in FIRST. At this event we taught students the basics of EV3 programming for FLL at Launch Workplaces. A total of 15 students and 8 adults attend our training. We had trained kids on moving straight, turning, and raising and lowering the arm on a robot. We presented a summary of the FLL Jr. program for interested and potential coaches. The purpose of this event was to inform and inspire potential coaches to start new teams in order effect a 7% increase in the FLL Jr community. We had fifteen parents come to the event. One of our teammate's parents was inspired to start a team for her younger daughter and one parent paired up with a parent from another school to start a team. We had two “booths” right next to each other. We had our main booth, which was how we interacted mainly with parents, and we had a tile mat with our pushbot and ev3 educator bot running to engage the kids and get them interested in FIRST. At the beginning, we had an official booth with all of our FIRST flyers as well as Arjun’s LED matrix shades, which hooked kids and adults who came to our official booth. The LED matrix shades also helped boost our maker spirit, because it really interested a lot of people. On our mats, we had the pushbot participating in our “block stacking challenge”, where people tried to stack last years blocks with foam grippers on our pushbot. We also had kids drive our EV3 educator bot, which was to demo FLL robots, and represent FLL.
We shared information about FIRST with the community of King Farm. At this event we hoped to inspire children to join FIRST (FLL Jr or FLL) and to sign up for our coaching and guidance sessions, so we would be able to either guide them or inspire them start a team. Additionally, we hoped to educate children and parents about the FIRST mission and goals and STEM in general. At the event, we demonstrated our FTC robot to the general public. We explained how people can get involved in FIRST activities. People had fun driving both the pushbot and Merlin. Lots of people enjoyed learning about how the robots works and being able to drive around the robot. It was really cool to talk to people about how students from FTC move onto FRC which was the main attraction at this event. Our team acted as ambassadors for FTC. We will be demonstrated our FTC robot for the general public. We talked about how kids could get involved in FIRST activities. Our goal was to reach out to about 100 people and explain how they can get involved in FIRST Robotics. Our team also led two training session: one for new FLL coaches and one on EV3 programming. About 15 coaches came out of the training comfortable with teaching their kids the basics of the EV3 programming language and able to prepare their kids for judging. We also had a good turnout of children ready to learn about EV3 programming. We had 17 coaches attend the training. From 9-12 AM, our mentors and coaches (Pankaj O. and Parvathy S.), gave a presentation on what to expect for the Core Values and Project sections of FLL. Arjun, Maanav, and Rohan provided examples from their experience from previous years. After lunch, Ishaan and the coach lead the robot portion of the presentation. They talked about how to plan a program and how to create programs in the EV3 programming language. At the end all of the coaches said that this was a very useful event for them and one even said that we could have charged more for the event! All the presentations were made public to the coaches at the following google drive:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0BzL4RSTIUNX0VTA1cnl3eXdwVWM We trained 15 girls to be able to use the EV3 programming language. We had 8 parents sign up for more information. One of the parents is coming to our coaches' bootcamp, because she liked the way we were teaching. We had 3 wizards, Arjun, Rohan, Raashi, and 2 mentors give the training, which lasted for 3 hours. We all took turns in describing our experiences from FLL, and helping the mentors in coaching. The girls were broken up into groups of 3 per robot. One of the most fun parts of this event was when the girls had a maze exercise, and they then got an appreciation for pseudocoding. At the end, the girls made their robot go forward 30 cm, play music, and back up. This could help them complete this year's FLL shark mission. When they were leaving, we got each girl one of our LEGO FIRST pins.
On September 12th, our team hosted a FIRST in Maryland laser tag event for all teams in Maryland. We had teams from FLL, FTC and FRC attend this event. Over 30 people played at the event and everybody had fun. Our team looks forward to hosting more events like this and hosting this event next year.
Our reason for running this presentation was to help educate rookie on how to prepare for a qualifier and what to expect of the event. During the 2016 Kickoff, Ishaan, Raashi, and Sarthak gave two presentations. The first presentation was in a small room with about 15 people and the second presentation was in an auditorium with about 30 people. Our presentations went very well and people came and told us that they had learned a lot. The presentation was posted on our website at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzL4RSTIUNX0N0RybmdxeGFjbVU/view We demonstrated Merlin and the FLL robots to engage the kids and parents and talked to the parents about getting their children involved in FIRST. Beverly Farms offered to host FLL or JrFLL as an after school activity and we needed to find a parent who was willing to be the lead coach. We got 25 parents interested in FLL Jr. and 9 interested in FLL who signed up to get more information.
At this event we brought our FTC mat and two Ev3 robots, and informed as many people about FLL and Jr.FLL as we could. We also let the kids play with the robots and had fliers with information on them for the parents.
Our main goal for this event was to inform as many people as we could about FLL. We wanted to get both kids and parents interested. We also wanted to tell people about our trainings so the rookie teams could learn about the basics of FLL. |