In addition to our regular After School Program which is open to interested students from Grades 5 to 8 we tried something new and entered the First Lego League (FLL) competition with a group of 8 experienced "Lego Engineers" This group started working in October as the FLL competition is held in early January. These students quickly found that they were in for something more challenging than they had experienced before and that time was of the essence. It turned out to be a lot like a real engineering task and although their robot was less than stellar in the competion they won the award for the most creative presentation. We are hoping that entering the FLL competition may be available to next year's 8th grade students during there semester of Tech Ed.
    The larger after school group hopes to culminate their experience with another exhibition at Robotics Park. Currently they are working on their skills by tackling weekly mini challenges ranging from robotic weight pulling competitions to mastering line following with a light sensor.

Comments from our past students include:

"My strengths in robotics is designing the car in my own way. What I hope to accomplish is programming, for I don't know one word that they tell me to do. I guess you could say I'm more creative than scientific. But as you know, I want to and I will accomplish programming and all that scientific stuff." - 5th grade girl.

"My strengths in robotics are building strong structures. I like to work with my hands. I learned the old RoboLab. I want to learn how to use all the functions on the new RoboLab. I also want to win Robotics Park." - 6th grade boy.

"... I think our team is a good team because we all work together and shared work evenly."