Our Progress to Western Edge

Here are our regular updates on our progress!!  We competed May 31 - Jun2, 2024!

June 2, 2024 - Day 3 Western Edge!

The team woke up early on the last day to participate in the on the spot challenge.  This one was fun because they got to experience elements of Lego League AND try to suspend their robot in the air like the FRC teams!  B.U.I.L.D. had a great time hanging out with their alliance partners Pinkston Robotics and Reptile Renegade!  No more formal awards for the WI teams but they should be proud of their best robot performance, gracious professionalism nod for their Daniel Gives Back "Deeds for Daniel" kindness drive, and project work!

Thank you to everyone who supported the team!!

June 1, 2024 - Day 2 Western Edge!!

Longest day!  We started the morning with a birthday celebration and a FLL graduation (with caps!) for our 8th graders!  From there the kids prepped and executed a great project presentation and logged two 400+ runs, setting their highest competition score of 440.  On that last run the orange man jump ropes and toilets and coffins (yes, I know) went missing at the table but Coach Nicole sprinted back to the practice tables and pits to find them with 40 seconds to spare.  Coach Nicole wins coach of the century for that sprint!  After that one of our teammates filmed a marketing promo and we got the on the spot challenge!  Kids coded, swam, ate, coded, and built until 10 and turned in.  ;-)

May 31, 2024 - Day 1

Day 1 of Western Edge started bright and early with a team breakfast, about 10 boxes of "stuff" and some cow bandanas.  We traveled by foot to the arena and spent some time hanging out in the lovely CA weather before bring allowed into our pits.  From there the kids started assembling our home base, put our project back together, and kick started the robot (which suffered no damage and did not brick!).  Some kids were assigned to give pit tours and others to start our clothespin game - secretly clip one of our pins on another team without them noticing (a big hit!).  The team also encouraged acts of kindness all day to honor our sponsor Daniel Gives Back.  At the end of the day we collected 65 acts in his memory!  We will continue to collect these through the weekend.  At the tables today we scored 370 which is short of our max 520 but our red and blue sides were working a plan to 450 this afternoon. And, as I reminded the team, we broke our state curse so we had a lot to be proud of ;-).  We ended the day with project and robot presentation practice and are looking forward to judging, 2 robot runs, and the alliance challege drop tomorrow!  ;-)

May 29, 2024

Today and tomorrow our team travels to the Western Edge Invitational in Long Beach, CA!  We have 8 suitcases/duffle bags packed up with our robot, pit, and project in them!  We had our last Robot practices over the holiday weekend and our last judging presentation last night.  The team was pretty calm under pressure - one of our motors died during our last practice and we had to take apart the robot, then put it back together, then recode parts of the robot runs because the performance of the robot changed!  Good thing we use all those sensors because it only took 2 hours recode and retest.  All is well now.  We celebrated with cookies and are ready to gooooo!!!

Ready to Fly!!!  GO TEAM GO!!

Coach Jen & the B.U.I.L.D. Kids

May 9, 2024

Drilling the robot game and speeches, practicing pit build up and take down, creating new posters, finishing the traveling project model and new features, and starting the packing process!  We have 3 weeks to go until the competition date and there's a flurry of activity going on!!   Once we get the link to the live stream, we will publish our robot competition times so you can join in the fun May 31-June 2!

Getting Excited!!

Coach Jen & the B.U.I.L.D. Kids

April 7, 2024

Bowl with B.U.I.L.D. is complete!  Almost 100 people came to bowl or support our bowling event at Sussex Bowl.  As a result, our team was able to raise another $2000 towards Western Edge!  We also showed off our new artistic sculpture (travel size) and launched our Bowling Art Gallery on our website.

Other than fundraising, we revamped our project and robot speeches, created pit materials and our sponsor poster, updated our robot runs, and now are back to drilling our robot game so that we can build our muscle memory.  This week we'll start learning our new parts and creating any new visual aids required for Western Edge.

We are getting there!!

Coach Jen & the B.U.I.L.D. kids

March 16, 2024

In the last few weeks we were granted donations from several local companies and are so close to our fundraising goal!  Thank you for helping us get this far!!  

This morning we presented our project and showed off our robot at the FRC Wisconsin Regional at the Panther arena.  It was a lot of fun interacting with kids interested in robotics and we picked up really cool swag from the FRC teams in attendance.  Check out our pictures on Twitter at @league_lego!

At home we've been revisiting our project to shrink it in size, make it lighter, and improve the artistic elements for Western Edge.  Our project has been our strong suit this season so we want to give ourselves the best shot at placing at the competition.  We are also reimaging our robot strategy and completed an alternate run 2 using the forklift attachment so that we can reduce our transition times and reduce operator error while resetting the robot in the blue home base. 

If interested, the kids have a Bowling fundraiser and raffle on April 7th.  See the Bowl with Build Tab!

Again, truly grateful for your support!!

Coach Jen & the B.U.I.L.D. kids

March 6, 2024

What a week!  Our team contacted 146 vendors, retrieved 47 donations, and fundraised $2200 last week!  Then we did an outreach activity at Discovery World downtown and had a Portillos fundraiser.  W.O.W.!!  We are now officially over halfway there and livin' on a prayer, just like Bon Jovi.  

On the robot side, we updated / reconfigured attachments and recoded our red line missions to improve reliability of our robot game.  We are also eyeing up a new consolidated approach to moving the movie camera on the blue side using the red side forklift and finding new ways to drop off our Lego people. 

The team is also looking to increase interest in bowling and will be holding a bowling event on April 7th!  Keeping ourselves busy for sure.

We are getting there!!

Coach Jen & the B.U.I.L.D. kids 

February 17th, 2024

We have been getting ready for our STEAM fundraiser and outreach later this month. They also had the opportunity to give back to the community by creating 60 Valentines with robotics activities for kids at Children's hospital! Kids have set goals for Western Edge and are driving to those goals. We recently completed revising our project presentation for maximum impact (kids are practicing that!) and this week we will start recoding our red and blue line base for improved consistency and efficiency.

We now have 4 scheduled eat-out nights and 31 silent auction prizes - WOW! Details here - https://sites.google.com/view/build441992023-2024/donate. Our current fundraising, including the GFM, stands at approx. $3000 as of today. 

Again, THANK YOU for your support. It means a lot!

Coach Jen & the B.U.I.L.D. kids

February 4th, 2024

Hello! We had a busy week soliciting silent auction/corporate donations, volunteering and running a bake sale at a First Tech Challenge event, and making valentines for the local children's hospital! We are back to roboting and project development for a few weeks until our Feb 28th STEAM event/silent auction, Literacy night project demo, and Portillos fundraiser!

Thank you for coming on this journey with the team! Including this GoFundMe, the team now has $1100 in promised corporate/business donations, and $301 from our bake sale, and $320 from supporters here! Hooray! 

January 25th, 2024

Come see us on February 3rd at the Battle of Brookfield First Tech Challenge event! We will be demonstrating our FLL Challenge Masterpiece robot, holding a bake sale, and teaching about bowling using our Project STRIKE interactive sculpture! For more on the event - https://ftcscout.org/events/2023/USWIBRQ2/teams