Recently Moose Hill had the pleasure of seeing a presentation from a local FIRST Lego League group – Robo Rampage. This group of six students attend middle schools in both the Sharon and Canton Public Schools and part of preparing for competition during this tournament season is to present their challenge project to various professional groups in order to practice their presentation, ask questions, and listen to our thoughts or questions to help improve their overall project.
When Pooja, Soumil, Arun, Daniel, Thanh, and Arjun arrived to present their project, you could see just how much this team is a team. This is their 5th year working together, a few members have left and a few new members have joined, but you would never know that from the interactions we saw, and they have done well as a team at competition. They were excited about this year’s project and had lots of questions for us – and we had a lot of questions for them, too.
So what is this year’s challenge? Animal Allies – identify a problem when people and animals interact; design a solution that makes the interaction better for animals, people or both; and share your problem and solution with others. Team Robo Rampage set their minds to the task and each team member brought at least one project idea to the table. After presenting their ideas to each other, a vote was done to determine the winning project.
The winning project? To build a thermal detector for cars that would help drivers to know of an animal that might be crossing the street – say a deer – and would then help the driver to brake the car to avoid any collisions. I think we all realize how useful this could be, especially on those back roads, late at night, or at dusk when it can be hardest to see what animals might lay ahead.
So what happens at competition? The audience mostly sees teams playing the Robot Game, but the teams are actually judged on a few things: Core Values, Project, and Robot Design.
We wish Team Robo Rampage the best of luck at the competition on Saturday and we cannot wait to hear how you did! Thanks for visiting and sharing your project – it’s awesome!