For those of you who don't know, or who haven't competed in FLL, it is a division of FIRST for middle school students. Every year FIRST comes out with a different theme, this year being Food Safety. The teams then need to build lego robots to complete a number of tasks on a table about 4' by 8'. These tasks range from the simple, like take the lego fish to this area on the table, to the complex like catch all of these lego bacteria as they are dumped out of a lego pallete.

The teams also need to do a research project. In this project, the teams research a problem related to the current year's theme, and come up with an innovative solution to it. The teams then give presentations to both their community, and a panel of judges at the competition.

The teams must give a technical presentation on their robot to a panel of judges. One interesting thing about this is that the teams can do good in the technical presentation, and score badly on the table, or vice versa. These two scores, while related, are not dependent on eachother.

Lastly, at each competition, the teams must go through a core values interview. In this interview, the judges give the teams a certain task that they must solve. Whether or not the teams solve this task does not matter, what the judges look for is how they go about solving it. Is everyone heard? Did they work well together?

This season, I mentored an FLL team, FIRST Team 44, Onymous. This took place over a period of a few months. The team consisted of 10 students, ranging from 5th grade, to freshman year, and consisting of a few different ethnicities. Over the season, I saw this team at their best, when they were all working dilligently, AND at their best, when they were all just having fun together. It was a good sight to see.

They competed at Batavia's regional, hosted by Fox Valley Robotics, where they won an award for their research presentation. Which was on the safe transportation of milk. The problem that they saw was that if the milk reached an unsafe temperature during transportation, but then was re-refridgerated, the consumer wouldn't know. Their innovative solution was to develop a thermo-chromic leucodye sticker (basically a mood ring in sticker form) that would change color if the milk heated up to an unsafe temperature. This sticker could be placed on the milk at the start of the travel, and remain on the milk for its entire journey. That way, the consumer would be able to see whether the milk was safe to drink or not, rather than relying on faith in the producer, or their own sense of smell.

The night before the State competition, a few members of Order2Chaos joined me in helping them to prepare a technical presentation. At State, they blew me away by how well they did. The table runs went well, and their presenatations were AMAZING. This is coming from a FIRST Veteran who has seen good presentations. While they didn't win any awards at State, I was extremely proud of them, and was glad I was able to help them along the way.

This is my first year on the team, and I'm loving it. I decided to join the programing team because I thought it would be a great time to learn Labview, which I had never used before. I've certainly learned how to use it, but using it well is another matter entirely. Messy code in any language is annoying to look at, but Labview takes it to a whole new level. For once, the code can actually look like spaghetti. Noodles go everywhere, and when trying to trace one you're suddenly inturrupted by a big lumpy meatball that you can't make heads or tails of. Luckily, I was already used to BASIC when I joined the team. The only option there is straightforward, sequential lines of code. Labview felt very freeing because I can have two things running at the SAME TIME! Isn't that great? Why not have 20 things running in parallel? Why not ALL THE THINGS? Also, on the topic of spaghetti, I feel I ought to say that I don't like the meatballs anyways.