After running Robot sessions with youngsters for nearly 14 years, when I heard about First Lego League (FLL) I was intrigued. I was looking for an
opportunity to take the children further in their learning and challenge their programming skills and so I jumped at the chance to enter the competition. The FLL competition consists of three parts: the Robot Mission, the Project and ‘Core Values’ showing that the members work and cooperate as a team. I coached a team named the Agile Panthers, for the 2016/2017 Animal Allies First Lego League tournament and in January 2017, we entered the FLL tournament at Portsmouth University.
The following shows my thoughts and reflections of preparing for the FLL competition.
What a journey Agile Panthers had preparing and entering the First Lego League “Animal Allies” tournament. Meetings were held between September 2016 and early January 2017. When the team signed up to take part in FLL, it was before the 2016 Summer Holidays and it seemed a long, long, time ago.
Having coached a team in Autumn 2015, I did have a rough idea what I was letting myself in for but none of the team did. We began by building the Lego models, no problem, but when it came to working out what had to be done, what a challenge. But we got there. We eventually built and programmed our robot and devised a presentation for the project. Please see our Agile Panthers blog for details of how we got on.
It was a great team effort. There were fantastic builders with the chief builders Tom and Morgan, with Lottie, George M, Jamie and Cameron producing many prototypes and accessories for their Robot missions; great programmers with Morgan, Lottie, George M, Jamie and Cameron; Jorja recorded and blogged our activities, and excellent researching and planning of the project leading to the presentation with Dan and George H. Everybody played an important part.
However we did tremendously well at the tournament (see details of the day) as Agile Panthers WON the Core Values, came second in the Technical Presentation, third in the Robot mission and were ungraded in the Project presentation. Wow what an achievement and, after talking to the judges, I understand we came third out of eight overall. Brilliant!
Our team Agile Panthers felt very proud of our achievements.
There were many people that helped and I would like to thank them especially parents that dropped off the members, helped at the FLL sessions and provided snacks at the sessions.
A big thank you to Agile for ICT Education for sponsoring Agile Panthers on our journey. As Agile Panthers is an independent team of children from different schools working outside school hours, it was brilliant to have Agile ICT’s commitment and support. Agile ICT recognised that FLL is a great way to encourage children to learn, and that First Lego League can be used to educate children about programming, real life challenges and team building. They helped in many many ways by setting up the Agile Panthers website, paid for the hall hire, other expenses and provide our team tshirts. Check out Agile Panthers website for more details of the team and First Lego League.
On the Saturday after the FLL Tournament, we held a party to celebrate the Agile Panthers hard work. The Portsmouth Evening News came along and wrote a great article on our team entering FLL and my Robot Clubs please see article. I’ve had many enquiries about how the newbie Robot Club members could join the FLL as they were impressed, intrigued and amazed by the task.
I hope the youngsters will be able to take the experience of FLL with them in life as by working in a team on a difficult problem, anything is possible. I am sure it will look good on their CVs later when they apply for jobs or university.
Thank you again to everyone that joined me on the journey. Although it seemed impossibly hard at times, I would never have missed it and I am very glad that I committed to it.
Liz Stoneham
AKA
Robot Liz-ii
