Congratulations to all our teams this year on your hard work. We had two teams win awards at the most recent event at Waverly Schools: The Tractor Challenge - Blue from Alaiedon received the "Rising Star Award" and Tractor Challenge - Maroon from Steele Elementary received "1st Place Robot Design". All our teams did a great job and we are excited to see how they continue to grow and learn.

A huge congratulations to Tractor Challenge - Maroon for being our first team to ever qualify for the FIRST Lego League Challenge State Championship.

Program Description:

FIRST Lego League Challenge is known as our Tractor Challenge Program. The primary focus of this level is designed to help your student become more familiar with FIRST Core values and teamwork. Working on understanding how the programming thought process works as well as basic design/construction. They will work on the fundamentals of engineering with a focus on real-world problems by participating in designing an Innovation Challenge. The challenge/problem will change from year to year and be based on the FIRST theme of the season. Students will work with Spike Prime Lego kits to design a robot that can complete different tasks and missions. In programming, students will focus on using block-style programming to create multiple programs for the robot to execute.

Event/Activity:

Students will participate at least one FIRST Lego Qualification event. At the event, students will have multiple chances to score as many points as they can using the robot they built and programmed. The team will also give a presentation to a small group of judges. During this presentation, students will describe the FIRST Core values and how they incorporated them into the team dynamic during the season. They will explain the design/programming of the team's robot and what special things they learned. In addition, they will present the design of the team's Innovation Project derived from the game theme. Events are designed to be fun and to celebrate the hard work students put into the season. Winning awards and scoring points is nice, but the key focus is developing strong, independent thinking, and team-oriented students.

Team Resources:

Students will be working through guided lessons provided to the team leaders. During the process, they will keep an Engineering Notebook of activities they complete. The group will work on a basic presentation to give to the judges during the qualification event.

We will be adding videos and ideas to this section throughout the season to help teams as we progress. Below is a link to many resources on the FIRST website.