FIRST Lego League

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The FIRST Lego League (also known by its acronym FLL) is a competition for elementary and middle school students (ages 9-14, 9-16 in Europe), arranged by the FIRST organization. Each year the contest focuses on a different topic related to the sciences. Each challenge within the competition then revolves around that theme. The students then work out solutions to the various problems that they're given and meet for regional tournaments to share their knowledge and show off their ideas.

There are four main facets to the competition. Firstly, students are interviewed by a panel of judges probing them for their teamwork. Secondly, the students must demonstrate that the robot that they built is designed appropriately for the task given. Thirdly, the students must do an independent project that relates to the topic and give a short presentation to a panel of judges on the investigative problem solving they completed. Finally, the students must use the robots they designed to complete a set of tasks on a playing field.

FIRST Lego League (FLL) teams use Lego Mindstorms kits to build small autonomous robots that traverse these Lego playing fields and complete the given tasks. The organization is a partnership between FIRST and The Lego Group.

Students have eight weeks to work on their robot and their independent project. They go on to compete in FLL events, similar to the FIRST Robotics Competition regionals. In the 2005-2006 season, over 7000 teams, and 80,000 students from around the world competed. Each team has to compete in a local/regional qualifying tournament before advancing to the state/provincial tournaments. The 1st place director's cup winners from each state/provincial tournament is then invited to the World Festival. This year (2006), over 82 teams competed in the World Festival in Atlanta, GA (Team Roster).

FLL Challenge Designer Scott Evans with team from Pennsylvania, the 'ROBOWhizards', at the 2003 Mission Mars Invitational at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, GA

[edit] Competition Themes

In the past, the challenges have been based on several different themes:

• 1999 - First Contact (Space)
• 2000 - Volcano Panic
• 2001 - Arctic Impact
• 2002 - City Sights - Robots completed tasks such as clearing rocks off a soccer field, harvesting and delivering food loops, collecting toxic barrels, activating a windmill, and other city-related tasks.

• 2003 - Mission Mars - Inspired by the year's Mars Rover mission, competing teams had to design and construct robots to solve a number of problems like removing rocks from a 'solar panel' to ensure a Mars base energy supply, collect 'soil/rock samples' from the Martian desert landscape, etc.

• 2004 - No Limits (Disabilities) - Centered around various robotic assistant systems for disabled persons, robots demonstrate how the systems are (hopefully) able to solve the given problems in a satisfying way.

• 2005 - Ocean Odyssey - Involved marine-themed tasks such as mapping a sunken ship, deploying a research submarine, and cleaning up a shipping spill.

• 2006 - Nano Quest -The challenge is developing anything using nanotechnology that improves or makes life easier, from medicine to computers to the environment.'

[edit] News

In August 2006 a new Mindstorms kit called the NXT will be put out by Lego. FIRST is planning on integrating the new kit for the 2006 competition. The original RCX kits will still be allowed for the competition on 2006. However, Lego is no longer selling the original RCX Mindstorms kits to the general public.

The 2006 FLL topic will be on Nanotechnology. The FLL site for this year's challenge can be found here - Nanoquest.

[edit] See also

• FIRST
• RoboCup Junior
• Lego Robotics
• FIRST Vex Challenge

[edit] External links

• Official FIRST website
• Official FIRST LEGO League website
• FIRSTwiki: FIRST LEGO League
• FLL-Freak Website and home of the FLL UFAQ
• Portuguese FIRST LEGO League site (Portuguese and English)