What is the Robotics program at Central?
Lego Robotics is run by Ms. Mastico and Mrs Whigham. It is mostly focused on the First Lego League robotics competition. A table has missions to be completed, the students build and program the robot that will do as many of those tasks as possible.
Fall robotics
The year begins with the international First Lego League competition. Students are organized into teams of two to ten people, and develop a robot to do this year’s tasks. This year we have been promised three teams to be entered into the official regional FLL qualifier and they move on to State if successful. The three official teams are also required to complete a research and design project that complements the theme of the challenge.
After the qualifier, there will be an in-house competition to see who built the best one. Following this there will be a challenge arranged by your coaches, one year was burglar alarms, the next was Sumo bots. This challenge is only at Central and is informal.
Spring robotics
Later in the spring, Quincy hosts the President's Cup, a citywide competition between the middle schools. This is usually a past FLL challenge and consists of all the aspects of an official competition.
Signing up
It is a very competitive program, especially at the beginning while everyone is figuring out what they want to do (there are a lot of options at Central). There are a lot of students and not a lot of places in the club. In order to manage the requests, students must stop by the library before or after school, or at SSB in order to get a permission slip.