The public is invited to attend the First Annual Whitewater FIRST Lego League (FLL) Challenge Regional Event to be held at Whitewater High School on Sunday, December 8. The three fourth and fifth grade BrickLayer teams from Washington, Lincoln, and Lakeview Elementaries along with the sixth grade Iron Dragons FLL team from the middle school will be competing throughout the day with 19 other teams from Milwaukee, Waukesha, Washington, Dane, and Rock counties.
FLL Challenge is a program for fourth through eighth graders that encourages students to experiment and grow their critical thinking, coding, and design skills and showcase what they learned. In Whitewater, FLL Challenge is a pre-cursor to the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) program in place for seventh and eighth graders at Whitewater Middle School and the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) program in place for students at Whitewater High School.
FLL Challenge Participants work with Lego Spike Prime robots and design attachments and write programming code to make their robot interact with a series of up to fifteen “missions” on a table-top field. The robot must be preprogrammed to complete the missions, but students can interact with their robots when they return to their home area on the table to change out attachments and run different programs within a 2 minute 30 second timeframe. To learn about this year’s ocean-themed gameplay, watch the short video at https://youtu.be/J5u-2q_K3O0
Teams also complete an Innovation Project, which this year requires them to research a problem related to the oceans and propose a solution. Teams are expected to connect with experts, get feedback on their ideas, and make improvements to their plans.
On Sunday, each team will get four robot runs on the competition tables (one for practice, and three for scoring) and spend another 30 minutes presenting their project and robot to a panel of judges. Awards will be presented in a ceremony at the end of the day for overall champions, the innovation project, the robot design, the robot performance, and the team’s demonstration of the FIRST core values of teamwork, discovery, inclusion, innovation, impact, and fun. The eight top-performing teams will advance to the FLL Sectional Event in Waukesha on December 21.
Visitors are welcome to peruse the pit area where teams will set up small displays, watch teams work on their robots on the practice tables, and watch live matches. Anyone wishing to watch a judging presentation must be queued with the team and escorted to the judging room with the team. No one is allowed to enter a judging room once timing has begun. Teams will arrive beginning at 7:30 am on Sunday with the first judging sessions and robot runs scheduled for 9:00. Awards will likely start no earlier than 4:00 pm. The Whitewater FTC and FRC teams will also be doing robot demonstrations throughout the day in the cafeteria.
FIRST events are run entirely by volunteers, and an event this large will rely on approximately 75 volunteers to operate. Whitewater High School robotics team members, alumni, parents, and mentors will be joined by middle school FTC team members, WUSD Robotics Booster Club members, community members, Ferradermis sponsor representatives, and volunteers from many other high school robotics teams across southeast Wisconsin. Come join the fun!
Article Submitted by Laura Masbruch
Whitewater High School Robotics Advisor
lmasbruch@wwusd.org
Photos from the 2023 FLL Regional at Mukwonago High School
