Waste Warriors at the First Lego League Competition

The Waste Warrior team included (from left to right):
Andrew
Phaedra
Leo
Austin
Natalie
Grant
Pete
Oliver
Sebastian
Aidan

This is the Technical Interview where their robot design was judged. They had to answer questions about how they designed the robot, how they programmed it, and how they worked together as a team.

The robot competition consisted of two practice runs and three competition runs. Here's a video of their first competition run. FYI - all the videos here are "unlisted" in YouTube which means you can only view them if you have the link. You can't 'search' for them. If you'd prefer, I can password-protect them.



And some pictures of the various robot runs:

The green and yellow shirts that helped them 'stand out':

They were tops in the practice runs. You can also see the other 2 Bear Creek teams, the Trash Trekkers and the Recycling Rookies, doing great in the practice rounds:

I believe we were third in the robot scores in the actual competition but this was taken before the higher scorers had gotten their scores. Note that 357 was our 'perfect' score - all the missions that our team had prepared went perfectly. There were other missions on the table that our team had not had time to program. You'll note that Trash Trekkers are consistently doing awesome as well!

Legos are only part of the competition. A major part of the scoring is based on the project and presentation. Here's the end of the presentation skit:

Here's a video of the team's official chant. 

After the presentation, judges asked questions about the food waste project. You can see why the judges mentioned that these kids could teach adults how to run a project:

We sat through a very long awards ceremony. There were ten trophies on stage, a few plaques, and a bunch of "golden tickets" to the state level competition, all to be handed out to the best teams. I think there were 22 teams total. Half of them were middle schoolers.The team watched their friends, siblings, and other teams win these awards.  Finally, we got to the last trophy and golden ticket. I asked the kids if they were nervous.

Pictures of the championship team! First time Bear Creek has won the entire competition. I can't explain how ecstatic the team was. Even Heather was jumping up and down.

Huge thank you to Heather and Nicholas and Patty for coaching!

Picture of Waste Warriors, Trash Trekkers, and the Southern Hills Trash Talkers team. They will all go to the state level competition in January.

Huge thank you to Beth for running the whole competition and organizing the teams and making Bear Creek an awesome school: