Just got the email. Any comments?

Hello Teams,

National registrations for the Animal Allies season are now underway. Illinois registrations will be open on August 1st. Field set up kits will begin to ship at the beginning of August and will be shipped on a first come, first serve basis. The Animal Allies challenge will be announced on August 30th.

We will offer coach training sessions again this summer in various locations throughout the state. Details will be announced in the next few weeks.

We are aware that many corporations throughout the state offer matching donations or sponsorships for teams that are coached or mentored by their employees. Examples are Boeing, Motorola, Baxter, John Deere and Caterpillar. To determine if there may be funding available for your team, we recommend asking the parents and/or mentors to contact their employers.

We have received the following specific information with regard to Boeing-mentored teams. 

Boeing is adding FIRST Lego League to its suite of program grants offered to Boeing-mentored teams in For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) competitions.

The addition of FIRST Lego League expands the company’s funding opportunities to engage younger students in robotics and engineering concepts. Boeing also is a supporter of the FIRST Tech Challenge and the FIRST Robotics Competition.

Boeing employees can get involved with FIRST Lego League by mentoring a team. Mentors will work with up to 10 children (ages 9 to 14) throughout the year to research a real-world problem and develop a solution using Lego Mindstorms as a construction base. Employees do not need to be in an engineering field to mentor.

The company will provide grants to cover the $225 FLL registration fee for teams mentored by a Boeing employee or retiree. Current and new Boeing mentors are encouraged to put together teams before the end of the school year. The internal, online, Boeing FIRST Grant Application tool will be available to employees May 4 through June 30, and includes applications for all three categories of FIRST competition: FLL, FTC and FRC.

We have received the following specific information with regard to John Deere-sponsored teams.

Applications for John Deere FIRST team grants for the 2016-2017 season are now open for FLL, FTC, and FRC using the link below. Applications for FLL Jr. will open on 8Aug16.

www.JohnDeere.com/Inspire

The grants are available for participants within a 50 mile radius of 14 U.S John Deere home communities for all four FIRST programs. Additionally, teams can apply for a grant in any U.S. location if they have a John Deere employee or retiree committed to actively supporting their team regardless of location. For Illinois, this includes Champaign, Quad Cities and Dubuque, Iowa (which includes parts of NW Illinois).

Teams must apply and get approval for the John Deere / FIRST grant prior to completing (paying for) registration for the 2016-2017 FIRST season. You can register with FIRST, but should not pay for your registration as you may potentially forfeit your grant.

We are looking forward to the Animal Allies season!
The FLL Planning Committee 

How the trash trek missions were completed by other teams.

Chungtai spent quite some time on the mission, but kept on failing. This led us to think our approach may not be right. So we searched on YouTube to see how other teams accomplished these missions. Here are some very interesting ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10U9NbF3rz4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqEvKem1-nQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-1eS_v8IJY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P1EREM1Yzc

M11 Purchasing Decisions

This is the toy factory mission which requires the robot to move the toy plane back to the Safety. It has two steps, first pull the trigger and release the toy plan from the toy factory, second pull the toy plan back to the Safety. This is a mission that we have accomplished in the tournament, but the result was not consistent. Questions we have met include:

. How will you locate the trigger? We could not pull the trigger successfully every time during the tournament. Can this problem be fixed?
. How will you pull the toy plan back? Our initial design had a problem, the hook went out of the safety, and we had to make change during the tournament. Do you plan to use the same structure, or not?
. How will you design the robot to include all these components?

M07 Clean up

In this part, the robot needs to collect the plastic bag from the beach, and put all three animals to a circle. This sounds easy but it is really challenging. At least we failed some time during the tournament on the easier part.

. How will you locate the plastic bag and turtle? It is quite far from the Safety.
. What mechanics do you use to pick up (or push?) the plastic bag?
. How do you guarantee that animals can be put in the right circle every time?
. Can you drop the chick to the smallest circle?

M05 Career and M07 Clean up

M05 Career only need the robot to send at least one worker to the Sorter area. This is very easy to finish if we treat it separately. However, there are two questions we need to answer:
. Can the robot send the worker to the same location every time? This means that you won't be able to just aim the direction manually every time.
. Do we need to consider where the worker should be sent? Will it block future missions?

M07 Clean up requires the robot to pull the plastic bag from the Sorter to the Safety. Questions you need to think include:
. What mechanics do you plan to use to pull out the plastic bag and drag it back to the Safety?
. Considering the space between the Sorter and the Toy Factory, how will you design the robot?
. How will guide the robot to the right location?

2016 ANIMAL ALLIES CHALLENGE

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Coming 12 noon EDT, 30 August 2016

Get ready.  Get set.  Roar!  Or you could bark, quack, or squeak, because the 2016 ANIMAL ALLIESSM season is all about our furry, feathered, and finned friends.  In the 2016 FIRST LEGO League Challenge, more than 28,000 teams of students age 9 to 16* will look into the eyes of our ANIMAL ALLIES.  What might become possible when we learn to help each other?

FIRST LEGO League challenges kids in over 80 countries to think like scientists and engineers.  During the ANIMAL ALLIES season, teams will choose and solve a real-world problem in the Project.  They will also build, test, and program an autonomous robot using LEGO MINDSTORMS® technology to solve a set of missions in the Robot Game.  Throughout their experience, teams will operate under the FIRSTLEGO League signature set of Core Values, celebrating discovery, teamwork, and Gracious Professionalism®.

http://www.firstlegoleague.org/2016-animal-allies-challenge

M9 Salvage and M10 Demolition

These two missions had been completed during our tournament. However, the problem was that the result was not consistent. The robot could not pull the valuable every time, and it could not hit the bar to demolish the setup building every time. The challenge this time is the consistency. Also, we plan to pull back all demolished parts, so new structure needs be added to accomplish this task.