Girls of Steel Robotics FIRST LEGO League Update #1

 

This season’s game for FIRST LEGO League is called RePLAY and it is focused on promoting exercise in the community. This year due to COVID-19, the students participate at Carnegie Mellon University using Zoom through Canvas.  Also due to COVID-19 and the lack of access to our robotics kits, we are placing a greater emphasis on the innovative research projects. For their projects, the students must devise a solution to a problem of their choosing that relates to wellness and exercise.  We meet every Saturday on Zoom from 2 to 4 pm.  We have 4 teams consisting of 37 students.

To present their research project solutions, the students on each team wrote a project outline and are creating a website to have an interactive platform for sharing their project with their users. 

On October 21st, the students were joined by our guest speaker, Mr. Bob Gillingham, who started his own CrossFit gym in 2013. Mr. Gillingham educated the students on his goals of providing health and fitness services to his community and also entertained a question-and-answer session. The students asked about a wide range of questions from why Mr. Gillingham started his business to how his gym is implementing new safety measures during the pandemic. A recording of his presentation and the Q&A session are available to other FLL teams as a good resource for research on this year’s FLL project about exercise. 

While it is not possible for students to collaborate on designing a robot this year, they still reviewed all the RePLAY challenge mission models  and created a presentation that explained them. Each team also received in the mail a mission model to explore at home. 

Our students shared some comments about their experience with virtual FLL this year:

“I like FLL because you get to learn and most important have fun!”
“I like working on the website”
“I love being in breakout groups.”
“I like all of the mentors and the advice they give us.”
“I really like my team.”
“I like how everyone is able to help one another.”
“I love FLL because even though we are online it is so fun it feels like we are all together. 
“I think my teacher is really nice!”
“I like how everyone is able to help one another.”

Returning FLL members miss a few things like:

“I miss getting together and working in the robot.”
“I really miss testing out our program for the Ev3 robots.”
“I miss the in-person core value activities.”
“I like my team and how we can still get close to the same experience from home,
but I miss being able to physically handle the Ev3.”
“I like how we can still communicate even when we are online,
but I miss actually meeting each other. Maybe after COVID though.”
“I like that we get to communicate with one another,
but I miss being in person because there were less technical difficulties.”

This year the Girls of Steel FRC team established the FLL subteam.  During the weekly business team meetings, the FLL mentors collaborate and plan each FLL meeting.  This change is an improvement to provide consistent mentors and for the FRC and FTC team members to be more involved with the builders of the future. We are doing our best to make the most out of running our FLL teams virtually.  We strive to run the FIRST LEGO League season as normally as we can under the circumstances of the pandemic and the kids are still getting an amazing team experience working virtually. 

Stay tuned for our next update about the four innovative research projects.