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| Lego League Mission to Mars Challenge for 2003 April 2004
It was at Back-to-School night at Thompson Middle School in September 2003, when Diane Woodall was waiting to talk to her son's teacher. She overheard the science teacher mention to another parent that she was looking forward to the Robotics Team working on this past year's annual FIRST LEGO League challenge-Mission to Mars. FIRST LEGO League (FLL) is an international program for children created in a partnership between FIRST and the LEGO Company. Each September, FLL announces the annual Challenge to teams, which engages them in hands-on robotics design and authentic scientific research. The program sparked Diane's interest because her son always loved to put things together and build with Legos. She asked for more information and attended the first meeting where the teacher showed a video from the FLL, explaining the challenge and what the students must do. Diane volunteered to help out with some of the programming and began attending two-hour meetings twice a week after school along with her son, Joshua. The FLL Mission to Mars challenge involved eight intense weeks of work during which the students had to complete the Robot Game—designing and developing a FLL robot (built only with Lego parts) to solve certain missions on a playing field. They also had to complete a research presentation. Diane and the students found the project challenging. Because it was so time-consuming, most of the original students dropped out leaving only eight students on the team. Two weeks from the competition, the students started meeting 3-4 times a week and the last week before competition, they met everyday. During that last week, there were times Diane was getting to the school 1 p.m. and not leaving until 8 p.m. because they were continually rebuilding and reprogramming the robot, trying to get it to behave in a certain way. After the eight week challenge, the Robotics Team headed to high-energy, sports-like regional tournament where Teams were given points for the success of their robot in completing the missions, their research presentation, a technical interview, and their collaboration as a team. With only two members from a team being allowed to participate at a time, it was very exciting with team members cheering from the sidelines. Diane's students came in 5th place in the regionals. They received 1st place for research and for teamwork and were one of six teams to qualify for the State Tournament at Virginia Tech in February. Diane feels fortunate to have been able to be involved in this. "It was a great experience watching the kids build something that they came up with-something that they made work in order to accomplish the team goals. They learned so much during the process."
Page last updated: July 30, 2004 | Top of page |
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