Welcome to the 2022 First Lego League competition! The theme... Cargo Connect! The winners of the robot competition... The Treehouse Gang! (that's us!)
I know we've talked about it before, but I'm going to talk about it again anyway. First Lego League is a robotics competition ljke Pi Wars, but involving solely lego robots, and powered by Lego's Next, EV3 or new fangled Spike systems. BTW: the EV3 is where STEV3 got its name. We've been doing these for a while now.
Our team consisted of me (Charlie) and a group of local weirdos- I mean neighbourhood kids that were all eager to do something crazy and smart during intermittent lockdown. Jonny even quit piano lessons to join the team. We were the only non-school non-group group of the competition, with ages ranging from 11 to 16, and coding experience ranging from none to pro.
Our team name for the robot competition was The Treehouse Gang. Why? Because we spent a huge part of lockdown building a neighbourhood treehouse together.
After hyping the team up about earlier competitions, everyone was so excited when it came to the day since this was a new experience for the majority.
A big part of the competition was an innovation project, where we had to solve a problem with cargo. We wrote the most incredible short play about everyone's favourite space explorer, philanthropist and humanitarian, Jeff Bezos, telling him he should be reusing his shipping boxes instead of just dumping them on 1.6 million people's doorsteps.
The part of Jeff Bezos was performed by our resident thespian Kilian. The best line of the performance was "Only 10p? That's less than what I paid in taxes last year!"
But enough about Jeff Bezos! Let's talk about our epic robot!
Actually, why don't you just watch this video of one of our best practice runs:
With months of practice and iteration and hard work we ended up winning first place by a country mile in the robotics category. A good score is about 250. Our final score for the competition was around 390, leaving a space of over 100 points between us and 2nd place. WOOOOOOOO!
So you can see why we've stuck with Lego as our main building blocks for our robot in this years Pi Wars competition. We're pretty good at it. And now we've got PROOF!
YEEEEOOOOO! Best Bot In Belfast! (Left to right: Lorcan, Milo, Rory, Jonny, Charlie and Kilian)
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