Model Scouts Matthew and Katie’s grandmother, Miss Daisy has been our Senior Solutions senior partner for First Lego League 2012.   She is an energetic, social butterfly of her senior living apartment community.   The team learned much from her on problems she has related to daily living as well as problems of her senior friends that live in her senior apartment complex.  The team picked one of the problems she described as the focus of our Senior Solutions project.

FLL 2012 Team Photo with our Senior Partner.  Not pictured: Veronica

Today was the first UTD Coaches Clinic’ for 2012, hosted by Dr. Kenneth Berry. We made a lot of new contacts at the clinic and were able to hear advice and ideas from many other North Texas area FLL coaches.

This year Model Scout Robotics is maintaining a resources page with links and copies of documents relating to the North Texas Regional FLL tournaments. The page is available at http://modelscoutrobotics.org/projects/fll2012/resources/ , or you can follow the “FLL” links in the menu above.

We’ve created this page primarily for our own benefit — to make it easy to find and refer to announcements and files sent by the various contest organizers, especially when we’re away from our desktops. We figure others might find it useful as well.

If nothing else, be sure to join the North Texas FLL Google Group — lots of announcements and helpful discussions take place there.

Pm

By my calculations, the theoretical maximum score for FIRST LEGO League Senior Solutions is 733 points:

* Wood Working       25
* Medicine           25
* Service animals    20
* Bowling            60
* Strength exercise  25
* Stove              25
* Gardening          25
* Video call         40
* Quilting           90
* Cardiovascular    118
* Flexibility        40
* Transitions        65
* Similarity         45
* Ball game         130 (see note)

Total               733

Note: It’s possible to score 130 points in the ball game mission if the robot puts balls back into the rack without causing a glitch or violating Rule 24.

Pm

Note: photos updated on 8/12/2012 after we figured out more missions and got comments from other teams.  KT    Send us comments if you see any other changes.

In the spirit of Coopertition^® and Gracious Professionalism, below are pictures of our completed Senior Solutions robot game table with mission mat and mission models.   We think a lot of the school based teams in our area (North Texas) may not have access to their FLL robot game yet.     Our blog software only gives us 2MB photos.

Please note that my team is GUESSING about the mission model locations on the mat.    FIRST LEGO League will announce the official robot game mission board and mission descriptions on August 28th.    Here are some pictures with how we think it will look on the board:

Update: We also now think that the smaller part of the white broken chair starts in Base.   I’ll take a new photo at next team meeting.

Starting at Base and going clockwise around the board and then up the middle

We now think the bottles need to be reversed so you can see the white center labels from the photo below. We think the mission might be to find the orange bottles and take to home base leaving the green bottle within the lines at end of the game.

Good Luck with 2012 Senior Solutions!  We are busy working on MoonBots Phase 2, so if we don’t answer your comments for more information on mission elements, that is the reason for the delay.

Today was the first meeting of our team’s FLL 2012 season.

As a meeting opener, Matthew, Anthony and Katie ran FLL Food Factor robot game for new team members Walter and Veronica.   For the rest of the meeting, everyone built 2012 robot game mission models on the kitchen table.   We got all models built in 2 hours.  We then deduced most of the mission elements location on the mat.

The team is very excited about solving these mission challenges.    Robot game looks fun again this year.  One of us will post photos of challenges and mat in an article tomorrow.

The First Lego League 2012 Senior Solutions mat, mission model Lego pieces and build instructions arrived in a small box today at our coach’s house.

Katie and Matthew cleaned up the lab so our coach would open the box. An email from FLL had warned coaches to open the box and lay out the mat upon arrival so the wrinkles and creases would relax.  The mission mat was folded in the box, so Matthew and Patrick laid out the new mat on our FLL table.  Katie will publish a photo of the mat tomorrow.   We don’t have enough room to do MoonBots and FLL in our lab so we will use the lab for FLL since the FLL table is there.  We will do our MoonBots Phase II project in the spare room next to our FLL lab.

We had planned to wait to build the mission models until the FLL 2012 challenges were announced on August 28th.  Seeing the box of bagged Legos calling to us to be built; is like having unopened Christmas presents in the house.   Our coach contacted the rest of the team and we now have a meeting and build scheduled for tomorrow.  As we build, it will be fun to guess the robot game challenge missions.

We have 2 new team members.   Walter is a Webelos II scout in Pack 1113.   He’s on Matthew’s Select soccer team, loves building LEGO projects, is an awesome long distance runner and is a regional science fair winner. Veronica is his sister. She is also a Select soccer player, a great Lego builder and a district science fair winner.

It’s too late to have Walter and Veronica join the MoonBots build, but they are officially on our First Lego League team roster.

Welcome to the team Walter and Veronica!