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Getting started with FIRST Lego League might be intimidating to a first time coach, but there are many resources that can help aid in the process of coaching a team. As a team that has successfully founded and coached our own team, we’ve compiled some of our favorite tips, tricks, and resources below. If you have any questions or would like any additional support, please reach out!
FLL stands for First Lego League, the youngest FIRST program designed for primarily elementary school students. Within FLL, there are three levels—Discover (Ages 4-6), Explore (Ages 6-10), and Challenge (Ages 9-16). FLL is similar to other FIRST programs in the sense that there are a series of competitions that depend on advancement, there is both a robot game and judged awards, and that it is an international competition. The robot game is called the “Robot performance award”. Teams also complete an innovation project, which is another engineering project they design under a mission given by FIRST, typically related to the season’s theme. Teams will also complete and turn in a portfolio and judging presentation! You can find out more about awards here:
fll-challenge-awards-and-allocation.pdfInnovation Project & Coaching Resources
Innovation Project & Coaching Resources
When coaching a rookie team, we recommend starting by introducing them to the basics of FLL.
Some of the best ways to do this are by watching matches published to YouTube, and going over the game release video for the season you’re competing in!
It’s also good to introduce them to the parts that they have access to and showing sample robots such as the prebuilt Spike Prime, robot reveals published to YouTube, etc. This is to ensure that they have basic exposure to the game before starting to strategize, design, and build.
Another helpful skill is to do game analysis. Using a template like the one here, you can have the team watch the game release video and go task by task to complete cost benefit analysis. Not only will this help them learn the game and cost benefit analysis skills, it will also help in deciding which tasks the team wants to complete first. This will then help you determine the preliminary steps and basic functional requirements when it comes to actually designing the robot.
A great way of staying organized is to keep an engineering notebook. You can take notes on the progress you have made after each time you guys meet, making it easier to pick up where you left off the next time. Additionally, this serves as a one stop shop of documentation, making things easier to find later.
We recommend practicing with building a basic or advanced drive base, which you can find on the Spike Prime app. This will give you a versatile foundation that you can use to add attachments onto. There are also tutorials on how to actually create attachments that you can then integrate into the software.
These will be easy and a good way to learn on how to create a sturdy robot at first. Once you start testing and experimenting you can start tweaking the current robot you already have built to suit your needs.
When you’re branching out to other designs besides what is just on the Spike Prime application, there are many free resources that can introduce different parts and their purpose. We had lessons on how different gears work, and had the team identify matching gears to their purpose.
For making attachments, we had the team watch this video to get an idea on how modular attachments are connected to the robot and what purposes they can serve.
Lesson Resources
Lesson Resources
Here are some resources our team has compiled for how you can structure each type of lesson!
Code lessons:
Pseudo code worksheets
Practice color sensor placement by asking the students where they think the color sensor should go!
Gryo sensor placement
Quick slides on gyroscopes
If time allows, have everyone write a program and test!
Building lessons
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