What is the competition like?

The FLL competition is broken into 4 parts:  Research Presentation, Programming, Building, and Scoring points.

 The students must build a robot using the Lego robotics kit and other Lego pieces.  The robot and all of the attachments that the team builds are judged on the quality of the design and how well it is built.

 Then the teams must write programs on a computer and download them to the robot.  The teams have a choice of a few different icon based programming languages from which to choose.  They are judged on the complexity and effectiveness of the programs.

Then students run the robots on the competition board, which has 11 different missions for the robot to complete.  Each mission is worth a certain point value for partial or full completion.  The robots run the board autonomously, but the students can change attachments on the robot in between the programs that they run.  They have two and a half minutes to score as many points as possible.

Each year’s missions focus around a theme.  This year the theme is the Climate Connections.  So missions on the board involve tasks like placing insulation on a house, delivering scientists to different parts of the world and delivering levees to a flood zone.  The students also must research an issue related to the theme and find robotic solutions to the problem.  This year the teams were required to present their research findings on climate connections to the public.