LEGO Robotics Competition @ ASU

Every week this kid could not wait for Friday night.  He LOVES Lego league.  Since the beginning of August their team has been designing and learning to program their robots and preparing them for competition.  Each of them were given an NXT kit and asked to come up with a robot design that they felt would be able to best complete the required tasks.  Then they tested each of the robots on the playing field and decided as a team which elements of the different designs that they wanted to incorporate in their team robot.  They ended up choosing Hunter's design which was exciting and then spent the next few months learning to program the robot to complete as many tasks as they could.  Before we knew it the competition was here.  Twenty two teams from around AZ met at ASU polytechnic to battle their robots.  I was surprised to see the variety of size, experience, and age of the different teams.  Ages of the kids competing ranged from 8-14, there were a couple small teams like Hunter's with only four of five kids and then some large teams associated with ASU that had twenty plus kids on them.  This was the first year for all the kids on Hunter's team to compete and some of the teams had had quite a few years of experience together under their belt.  I dropped Hunter off early and he and his team set up their station and began prepping everything while I ran back to get the rest of the fam.  

Shot of the playing fields for the robots....

Pic of their robot....

Once they were all set up their team had to go in and do a presentation for the judges about the theme for 2014 "Learning unleashed" talking about the different ways they each learn and solve problems and what they learned about programming their robot.  They then spent the rest of the afternoon battling robots with all the other teams.  When it was their turn they would have two minutes and thirty seconds to have the robot complete as many of the ten tasks as it could.  It was nerve wracking to watch.  The really neat thing was that Hunter was in charge of the programming the entire day.  The timer would start and the ref would say "Le-go!" Hunter would enter the code and off the robot would go to the first task.  Once that one was completed it would come back to Hunter and he would put in a different code and send it on its way again to another task.  Sometimes when it came back he would add different attachments or sensors that were needed in order to complete the specific task.  

There were a couple of times the robot got off course or got stuck and Hunter had to grab it and start again which was a bummer.  Every time you touch the robot once it is out of the starting square it deducts points.  Hunter did such an awesome job and stayed so calm even when they had a few hiccups.  The best part was getting to sit and cheer him on and watch his team cheer him on as he worked.

When the buzzer sounded the ref would show him their score card for that match and go over how many points were earned and deducted. Then they would go back to their station and get back to the computers to work on adjustments and modifications to fine tune any problems they were having with certain tasks.

I walked over to the computer and sat and watched for a minute as Hunter worked on one part of the program that they were having a hard time with.  I was amazed just watching how much he had learned, how he knew how to make changes in the program and then would go test the robot on the practice field and then go back and fine tune again until the robot would get it exactly right.

They battled all afternoon, it was so neat to watch and so much fun.  Deke and I couldn't stop talking about how impressed we were with the way he led his team.

We were there from eight to five and it was really neat because Mom and Eden were able to come and Dad, Lisa and even Brenn and Berks were there.  So much family to cheer him on.

At the end of the day they took 13th out of 22 which was awesome for their first year and being such a small team.

It was so perfect for Hunter, he loved it!! On the way home he kept talking about how great it was and what he wanted to do different next year with his robot design.  I loved his ASU FLL shirt being an ASU alumni seeing the LEGO head with devil horns made me smile.  Had so much fun watching you today dude, you are the lego master. Can't wait for next year!! :) :)