What a day! Our first attempt at FLL, at least with me as the rookie coach and loads of rookie students. Here are my observations:
1. It's a LONG day. We left the school at 6:30am, drove an hour to get their, finished the day there at 5, drove an hour back and left school at 6:30. 12 hours on a Saturday.
2. Lots of down time at the tournament. This actually was helpful, as it provided some practice time for our research presentation as well as tinkering time between robot game rounds. iPods, iTouches, PSP's came in handy.
3. The students felt they did well in the three "judging" rounds": technical, research, and teamwork. I didn't watch them, since I didn't want to distract them.
4. We had some spectactular crash and burns in the robot game. High score was 165 out of 400, so lots of room for improvement there. Since this was the most precise activity and included math, engineering, programming,etc., it's not surprising that we struggled. My guess is we will have an "off-season" like the Eagles -- thinking about what went wrong and what we can to fix it.
5. We got our robot game scores almost immediately, and they were displayed prominently on a screen. However, we have no idea how we did on the judging rounds. Since they accounted for 75% of our total score, I wonder about that. Seems to place an undue emphasis on one aspect of the competition that is work worth 25% of the total.
We had a wonderfully supportive group of parents. Yay for the Cougarbots!
It's worth going through this the first time so that everyone gets an idea what is possible and how high the bar is set. All in all, a great experience.
