Lisa Bass
Contributing writer
Four FIRST Lego League teams will be representing the New River Valley this Saturday, Dec. 2 at the Virginia State FLL Championship in Harrisonburg, Virginia: Team 25762 Fire Breathing Rubber Duckies 2 of Blacksburg, Team 26833 Hexagon Force of Christiansburg, and Team 19941Brickadons of Blacksburg and Team 31515 Lego Eagles of Gladeville Elementary School in Galax.
These twenty-seven students will have a chance to demonstrate among seventy-two other Virginia FLL teams the thrill of learning through hands-on discovery with STEM.
Students, ages 9-14 years old, will have used advanced LEGO EV3 and NXT kits to build robots that are programmed to perform specific, precise tasks. Over the course of nine weeks, the teams designed, researched, built, programmed, tested, refined, and retested a fully autonomous robot capable of completing a number of very challenging missions.
They competed and won the Champion’s Award at the FLL Tournament held at Blacksburg Middle School on November 18, 2017, sponsored by the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council and FIRST Tech Challenge Team 4924 Tuxedo Pandas.
This year’s theme, hydrodynamics, asked FLL teams to develop a question related to water. After developing an understanding of the problem, teams have been asked to design an innovative solution- a solution that adds value to society by improving something that already exists, using something that exists in a new way, or inventing something totally new.
Over this championship weekend at James Madison University and Harrisonburg High School, all FLL students will be judged on their core values, research project, and robot design- and demonstrate just how well their robot performs on the competition tables.
