Jan 21-2007 FLASH: Garrett County brought home FIVE trophies from the Maryland FLL competition yesterday.

Southern Middle School (NeXt Gen) WON the "Champions Award", which earns them an invitation to the World Finals in Atlanta this April.

Bloomington Middle School (Radioactive Tater Tots) earned second place for the "Champions Award". A fantastic achievement for a rookie team.

Northern & Souther Middle School 8th graders (Four Stooges) WON the Robot Performance competition.

So. This is my first entry! Hurrah. This website is awesome, by the way- the perfect way to present ourselves to other teams and the community. Are we getting together in subcommitees tommorrow? We'll see. Hasta luego, amigos de los roboticos!

Kickoff went well at the GEARS center. After a FLL demonstration, we retired up to the lab where we watched the presentations on the video wall.

There was a collective gasp as the game field was unveiled....

OMG

Now that we've had time to think about it, it doesn't seem so bad :) We've started building mock-up manipulators to handle the "ringers".

Full group meetings will be held Wed and Sun at 5:30pm. Sub-groups will meet at additional times.

Only two days till the 2007 FRC Game is announced. If you can't get to the GEARS building on Saturday, you can watch it live at this address .. Starting at 10:00 am

robotics.arc.nasa.gov/events/2007_kickoff.php

Wow... What a day.

I got up at 4:25am and the team drove en-mass to Pittsburgh CMU Robotics Lab for the PA FIRST LEGO League Championship.

Team 2065 "NeXT Gen" (one of my Southern teams) was up first on table 5/6. It was our first and best match, with a points total of 357.

This number held up as #1 for the entire competition. There was a little panic in the second round when one parent was claiming that their team got 360 points, but that must have been a mistake, because it never showed up on the score board.

We had a joint FLL practice at the GEARS center last Sunday a ran matches against Chuck's Northern Middle School team. It was fun competing against another team for once.

Afterwards, both teams got to run Meshach (our FRC robot) for a while to burn off some steam.

Our Space Elevator presentation is also going well. The team presented it to the parents and educators that showed

The loft area's ralings were pretty basic, so I just finshed beefing them up, and walling in the bump-out. Now we have a cool Sky-Box that can be a "Member Only" space when running competitions.

The Sky-Box will also be a fun spot to control the robots from.

The next project will be adding benches to the loft area so we can setup a Lab (for building electronics and writing software.

We had a fun day at Swan Meadows School this Sat. Matt Abrams, the StarClimber team leader, came and did a presentation on Space Elevators in general, and then talked about his recent entry in the X-Cup Space Elevator Games.

I worked with the two "southern" FIRST LEGO League teams tonight. Things are shaping up pretty well. So far here are the missions that are fully functional:

I was at the new GEARS building today. There was an area in the main meeting room where the tiles had curled up (no idea why).