The team competed at the district competition in Webster City on December 2, 2022. The competition includes 3 robot runs, where they have 3 minutes to complete as many missions as possible. All missions are provided by First Lego League at the beginning of the season and the kids work all season to design attachments for their robots and write code to attempt to complete as many missions as possible. There is a lot of decisions that go into which missions to attempt based on the points available as well as the success rate for each of their programs. The kids split up into teams of 2 or 3 and each group tackled different missions. The robots don't always perform exactly how the code says they should, so it involves a lot of problem solving to come up with the best way to have the highest success rate.
Here is a link to the First Lego League playlist including videos of the 3 runs at the district competition:
Run 1:
Run 2:
Run 3:
The team also prepares a presentation for the competition. This year the theme was energy, so the kids decided on an idea to help solve the problem of sustainable energy. Archer's team decided to focus on using vegetables to create energy. They worked so well together and learned so much! After the presentation, the kids then answer questions about their project and their robot and its programs and how they worked as a team and made decisions. The parents are not allowed into the room for the competition, but we were able to watch a live stream from the room next door.
Here are the links to the presentation and some of the questions that Archer answered:
Archer gained so much confidence in himself to speak up and answer questions and his team really did. a great job in working together during the entire process right down to making sure everyone got to answer a few questions.
When it was time for the awards, their was a lot of waiting for the final results to come in. They presented a lot of different awards as Lego League does a great job in recognizing all the work and different strengths that are brought out during the competition and not just whose robot competed the most missions.
They gave away one award for the Mentor of the Year and to our surprise Jarad won this award! When they went to announce the winner he said "I hope we don't mispronounce this name," so that also made us think it wasn't Jarad. Afterwards, we found out that Dagney had recruited a few kids from the team to nominate Jarad for this award. Congrats to Jarad he was an amazing coach and mentor this year and he had so much fun and this award was well deserved!
When they finally announced the awards, we found out that they just declare one overall winner and then for the rest they just announce the teams that qualified for the state competition at Iowa State University at the end of January. As they started to announce the teams that qualified for state, one other Ames Middle School team qualified, but they didn't name Archer's team. We were surprised as we thought that they had a good chance to make it. Then, the last thing they announced was the Champions! The presenter had trouble saying the team name, so at first Archer's team did not realize that they won. I also think they were a bit in shock! The kids didn't even stand up and cheer. They were just like "did we just win?!" They didn't even have the kids come up to accept the award, which was kind of strange. But the kids were thrilled and we were so proud of them and all their hard work!!
Here is a video of the awards ceremony where they announced the state qualifiers and champions. Archer's team, "Attack of the Energizer Bunnies" is announced as the winner at 1:30. His team is sitting in the middle in the turquoise blue shirts. I'm not even sure they realized they had won. :)
When we went down to congratulate Archer, we asked if he was excited and he said "I don't want to go to state." We were surprised. I was excited because this would extend their season and he would get to continue with Lego League, which he loved for another month, for another month and work to make their programs and attachments better and write new programs and decide which ones would be best to run in the amount of time they had to complete the missions.
Then, we found out that he thought state was the very next day (Sunday) and that it was even farther away and. he was exhausted from the very long day! Jarad and Archer had woken up at 5:00 am to go to the Middle School and pick up other teammates and then drive about 1 hour to the competition. And then they competed all day until about 1:30 or 2:00 pm and then waiting around another couple hours for the awards. Once he found out it was in January and at Iowa State, he was a lot more excited!
Here is a link to the First Lego League YouTube playlist we created including the videos of the 3 runs at the district competition and the awards ceremony. You can copy and paste it into a new browser tab to see all the videos (they are the same as the ones posted above.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHF2ByFeYPaymuhWAkGAYvtcgB6A51TI2
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