Team RoboWizz

This season of FLL was an amazing one for our team and we had a great experience. FIRST came up with a great combination of simple to complex missions for the Into Orbit robot game . One of our favorite missions was Escape Velocity. We loved h ow it could shoot up in the blink of an eye and land smoothly on the top with the launch of the hard striking pad. It was also one of the missions that was close to base, and simple enough to help us score 24 points quickly . All we needed to do was add some weight on the part of our robot attachment that would strike the striking pad, then align our robot with the south wall to go straight, drop the weight on the striking pad to launch the rocket and then come back home straight at full speed. Done ! So, for this mission our robot attachment design was simple - like an upside down U, but it had 90 degree edges, and on top towards the left side, we put some heavy weight, like a rectangular, flat, wide surface area because that part wo...

After winning Champions Award (3rd place) at the East Massachusetts State tournament, we got nominated to represent Massachusetts at the FLL International Open at LEGOLAND, California. In order to offset the costs involved for the trip as well as to help STEM education in our community, we have started fundraising activities. We shared our presentation at the school committee meeting and it was well received. We also contacted the local Public Library to set up a time to do an activity with the broader community and library members and started planning for a robotics day. During class this week,  our team decided to move one of the robot tasks earlier in its sequence. It took us 30 minutes to reprogram our missions. Next we started working on a promo video to help with our fundraising efforts. We took the famous song "We will, we will rock you", modified the lyrics to create a parody and then took turns singing and recording it with our own background music. After that we add...

     Our team had been working three times a week for a non-stop, 4-8 hour session since the Newton qualifiers in preparation for the State tournament on Dec 15th. Now the day we had been looking forward to had finally come. We reached the venue around 7:30 am and quickly set up the pit - an area where we relax in between robot matches and judging sessions, keep our stuff, and explain to other people and teams what our science project was about. Then we started looking around for other teams we had met through out the season. In the past few months, we had made friends with other teams from Ashland, Acton, and Newton.We quickly identified where each of these teams were and chatted with them for a bit. After some time, our coach left for the coaches meeting while we explored other team projects which included interesting topics such as materials for astronaut space suits, a spinning growth chamber to grow plants in space etc.      Before we knew it...