The Third Year 1st Place Robot Game Award Winner at Southern California Championship——Furious Falcons First LEGO LEAGUE

2016-08-01

The Furious Falcons First Lego League (FLL) Team won the first place in the Robot Game in the Southern California FLL Championship Tournament on December 6, 2015 at Legoland. It is the third year in a row for Furious Falcons to win the 1st place in Robot Game at SoCal Championship with different team members every year.

FLL gains popularity every year among upper elementary and middle school students who participate in the challenges by programming an autonomous robot to score points on a themed playing field (Robot Game), developing a solution to a problem they have identified (Project), all guided by the FLL Core Values. This year’s theme is “Trash Trek”, a topic on trash reduction, recycling and reusing.

The Furious Falcons Team is composed of seven students who love Lego robotics and programming. They are Leonard Fan, Aaron Huang, Heidi Lau, Nicholas Liu, Emily Shi, Joshua You, and Michael Zeng from Carmel Valley Middle School, Mesa Verde Middle School, The Cambridge School and The Bishops’ School. The team is coached by Mrs. Olivia Tian, Mr. Mingxi Fan and Mr. Soon Lau. Mrs. Olivia also co-coached last year’s Furious Falcons team that won the Southern California Championship and then competed at the 2015 LEGO World Festival in St. Louis.

This year’s team is majority new members. They worked really hard since the summer in perfecting robotic design and performance. They built two compact and robust robots named “Bob” and “Kevin” which creatively used gyro-sensor and light sensors to guide their movements with efficient programming. Bob successfully achieved 745 points by accomplishing many missions within 2 minutes and 30 seconds defined time.

For their “Trash Trek” project, Furious Falcons invented an S.O.S. (Simple, Odorless and Slim) innovative composting method to encourage more families with or without backyards to turn fruit and vegetable scraps to soil amendment. The children shared their solution with friends in the neighborhood and at church. They also presented in the San Diego Kids Expo and interviewed a few professionals. Mrs. Diane Hazard, from the Solana Center for Environmental Innovation was very impressed with the children’s research and commended the solution would encourage more people to compost who would normally shy away from the traditional methods.

Over the summer, the Furious Falcons team raised $2000 themselves by running a week-long summer camp to teach young children Lego robotics programming. They have also run many workshops at different schools to promote FLL and assisted other FLL teams in programming throughout the year. Their goal is to encourage more kids to participate in FLL in the future.