Hello, world, and welcome back to my blog, titled Deven’s Bloopers, where I post all of my bloopers (and hopefully some of my successes) for the world to see.
Today’s (maybe) glorious topic of the day: FLL
You may ask, “Deven, what the heck is FLL?” Well, that’s a great question, and I know exactly how to answer it! (I would’ve said I don’t know the answer, but that’d be a lie and I’m not allowed to lie, or otherwise I get in a lot of trouble.) FLL stands for First Lego League. Never thought there would be a league for legos? Well, it’s not really just legos. Let me explain.
First Lego League (FLL) is an enrichment program at my school, and at many other schools across the country and world. It lasts for a semester, the first semester of the year. In the program, you build a lego robot that can do missions, and you also code it. There’s a theme for the year (this year it’s the fine arts) which all the missions revolve around. There’s also an innovation project, with a question, centered around the theme.
This year, my team is the Robonators (team number 31861). My teammates are Patrick, Asher, Atharv, Benjamin, Lingaadyakssh (Lingaa), and Willem.
For the robot part, it’s kind of like a game. You get two and a half minutes to get your robot to complete as many missions as you can. You do this by, in the season leading up to the competition, making and coding your robot and attachments so that it can maneuver around and to the missions, and so it can do the missions.
This year’s board
You also have an innovation project. The project is centered around a question, and the question is centered around the theme, and the theme is centered around things, and things are centered around the brains and ideas and philosophies and questions that come out of the totally human brains that belong to the top peoples of FLL. This year’s question is, “How can you use technology to bring engagement and participation in arts to people around the globe?” Our innovation project this year is centered around food. We essentially have a survey that asks you a couple of questions about your food preferences, then comes up with a couple of dishes that you might like. It’s called Foodie, and Patrick and Artharv designed it, along with some help from me.
Towards the end of the first trimester, there will be a meet, or competition. Ours is on November 11th. At the meet, we’ll do the robot game, where we will run all of our programs and earn some points. Then, we present our innovation project to judges and explain how it works. Over the entire competition, people who work for the FLL association judge a team on their core values, or how well they work together. Some of the core values are Fun, Inclusion, Innovation, Discovery, and Teamwork (there are two more, but I don’t know what they’re called. I should, but I don’t. I mean like I really should know them. I really really should). A lot of the competition is just waiting, trying to play games on your iPad, but realizing that you don’t have internet and so you can’t do anything but “Do I Have A Right”, which, come on, how many of us want to play that?