Team History

It's our second year, and we learn more, but still don't have a project. We had a team of two fourth graders, one sixth grader, and 2 new second graders. The biggest improvement we made on the robot was to use jigs and have multiple attachments that we could swap.  It wasn't pretty or smooth, but it helped us get more points. 

We made a plan to use sensors next year to increase our reliability.  The biggest thing we did was learn to be creative with our designs and to include more kids to get more done!

This year we added even more kids to the team.  We had a 7th grader, three 5th graders, and two 3rd graders.  We decided to do the project, and we focused on park fundraising through voting on park projects.  It was not very good, because we treated it like a boring school project without realizing we should actually try to invent something.  Still we learned how the project works and we actually enjoyed the process.  Next year we would be more creative.

On the robot side, we actually brought home some hardware! We won design and performance at Regionals and it was the first time we advanced! Our biggest improvement was adding a frame around the outside of the wheels to increase stability and we started doing multiple missions per run.  We practiced doing faster changeouts and got first place in Head-to-Head at Sectionals. 

This year was Covid so everything was messed up.  We were just happy to be able to have an FLL season, even though it was online.  

We also added a new 1st grader to the team, who joined our two 4th graders, three 6th graders, and one 8th grader.  Our project was an app called "Fitnez Kidz", which we made to encourage kids to exercise more and challenge each other to fitness contests.  It was also not a very good project, because we still had not learned to work with experts to improve our solution.  However, feedback from a judge was very helpful for our future years, which advised us to think about the project with the same amount of iteration, testing, and improvement that we do with the robot.

On the robot, we learned about passive attachments and programmed some really advanced line following using 2 sensors. We won the Design award and Engineering Excellence, and had the 2nd highest robot score of all the teams.

Still a Covid year, and no Sectionals because so many teams stopped being a team because of Covid, but it wasn't virtual, and one 8th grader graduated off our team.  We did replace him with a new 5th grader who joined the other two 5th graders, a 2nd grader, and three 7th graders.

The project was a smart shelf to help delivery people save time.  It used a raspberry pi and colored LEDs to light up which packages were to be delivered.  We tested this in a U-Haul and also got a lot of great feedback from Amazon drivers and distribution centers.

All the hard work paid off, as we won our first ever Champions award.  We also won the Performance at Regionals and made it to state for the first time. There, we won Programming at state and were even a Champions finalist.

This year we have three 8th graders and wanted to go all in since it was their last year.  We all got a head start in the summer and did a ton of testing with different robot designs. We tested EV3 vs Spike Prime in our "Robot Olympics" and made the switch to Spike Prime (watch our YouTube Videos to find out why). 

We toured a power plant, talked with electric vehicle owners, and learned about distribution through Dakota Electric who even sponsored us.  We invented the "Smarter Charger" which took the electricity from your EV and dumped it back to the grid during peak times and recharged the EV during the night when electricity was cheaper.  We built a working prototype and even filed a provisional patent.  We also worked with Argonne National Lab.

At Regionals we won Champions and Performance and moved on to State. We posted our first MAX point video on YouTube.  At state we won the Performance award and got 2nd place Champions! We went to Razorback in Arkansas and had an awesome time!!

This year we lost three 8th graders and gained three new 5th graders, so it was going to be a learning year. The season theme was about hobbies, and everyone played an instrument so we picked music.  We made an app called "Music Mania" that helps kids learn music faster, and gets them to actually like to practice by gamifying the experience.

At Regionals we got Core Values and moved on to state. We won 2nd place Coding at State. It was a chance for some kids to step into more of a leadership role on the team and prepare for next year.

This year we lost one person who moved away, but again, had three 8th graders with a plan to go all in.  The team also had two 6th graders and a 5th grader.

The theme was Ocean Exploration, so we had zoom calls with ocean experts all over the world.  One major problem we learned about was fish feeders in the ocean were inefficient, wasting lots of food and polluting the water that the fish live in.  Our solution was called the "eFishient Feeder", which used sensors to detect when fish were hungry and feed them efficiently.  We tested it at fish farms and worked with researchers in the Aquaculture lab at the University of Minnesota.  

We won Champions at Regionals and at Sectionals we got Performance and Champions. At State we got 1st place in Design and 1st place in Coding and made Champions Finalist. We got to go to WAFFLE (WPI Annual First Lego League Event) where we won the Design Award at a World Tournament! The judges said they liked all the testing we did to design our robot before even starting to solve missions and we shared a lot of that with other teams.