Lego Robotics

Lego Robotics at Central Middle School

November 13th there will be no robotics. We can meet on the 15th if there are folks that want to.

What we do at Central:

  • grade 6 meet on Tuesday

  • grade 7+8 meet on Monday

  • coaches are Mrs Mastico and Ms Rusch

  • we have 11 robot brains to work with

  • students form teams of 2-10 members

  • we work towards the FLL challenge of the season

  • three teams compete in the regional qualifier at Revere High School, December 9th.

  • the other teams compete in an in-school challenge

The new season has launched - here's a quick overview:

 

and this is a breakdown of the missions:

City Shapers

A fantastic day at QHS. The teams of Central dominated the table all morning, Bing Chilling scored more than double all but the second team and beat them by a solid third. More importantly, they worked well together to get this score and were consistently the best in all four rounds. They earned the prestigious Robot Performance Award for this top score and the Mechanical Design because of their consistency.

The six Central teams came back with eight awards. They won for their innovation project, for inspiration, for programming skills, and teamwork. An impressive showing. There were frustrations, as always, but they handled themselves with aplomb and all but a couple can be back next year to try again. (In high school they have Hyper 69 robotics and no longer FLL.)

FLL Superpowered

The competition at Revere was intense. Both teams performed well but with only ten of the thirty six teams advancing to the next round, we didn't make it. This table has some tricky obstacles with the missions appearing to be simple but with surprising conundrums. Both teams scored consistently well over five rounds which is an achievement since so much can go wrong. This was the first FLL competition we have attended since 2019 and we're looking forward to the Citywide event in the spring.

 group of students at competition practice mat         group of students at competition table

What is the Robotics program at Central?

Lego Robotics is run by Ms. Mastico and Ms Rusch. 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.