We were new to setting this up, so we relied on our mentors for guidance in making Dippin’ Dabbles user experience. Bailey and Sophia collaborated with us to achieve the following goals:

Learning Unity for VR and Connecting to our prototype, Gerald.

Weekly, we dedicated 2 hours at the ATR lab with Sophia and Bailey. We delved into Unity, crafting a rudimentary interactive game. Deciding to divide up, we formed two teams, the VR Experience design team and the Connectivity Programming team.

We wanted to know if other people would like our project as much as we do, so some of us presented the idea to our classrooms. We also designed a flier with a QR card that linked to surveys for feedback. 

We consulted agencies offering similar services for insights. I AM Boundless praised our solution, highlighting its potential for aiding individuals with disabilities or sensory issues. Shelly Hall at Kent Free Library noted similarities with their Library of Things program.

We’re planning in April, to keep meeting with Sophia and Bailey at the ATR lab to focus on enhancing our understanding of Python, adding more features to our app in Unity, and adding more controls to Gerald. 

Before concluding, we’d like to highlight our outreach and community involvement. Over the summer, we told others about FIRST Lego League by attending local events such as Hudson’s Ice Cream Social and Kent’s Heritage Festival. We also mentored two FLL teams, Royal Robotics (55484) from Dayton, OH who wanted to learn about the forklift design and Technoblades (60473) from Aurora, OH. They are a rookie team this year who were just looking for general advice. 

We also volunteered at a FLL Explore Expo in February. We helped Explore teams to find their scheduled events, on time. 

This slide shows the game field with 7 deployments showing as large circles.  You can see where our robot scores and how much field coverage we have.  The red deployment is the hardest as it solves 7 missions in 33 seconds.

When all the programming was finished it was time to start practicing our timed runs as a team. At first we didn’t think we would ever get our times down.  We programmed for 91 seconds of autonomous movement so that left us 59 seconds for set up.  With seven deployments, that’s about 8.4 seconds of set up for each deployment.  After 50 runs we not only added a mission since districts but we got our time down to 17 seconds left at the end of the game.

Our first deployment was done by Grayson, he programmed to pick up two experts and move the camera and sailboat for 30 points.  

One really cool thing we did was build attachments that solve multiple missions in one fast deployment. The attachment on the left scores 60 points in 8 seconds and the one on the right scores 30 in 10 seconds.  This is our pneumatic attachment.

Here are three of our short range deployments that score 80 points and were pretty fun.

Here are three of our short range deployments. 

This is the big one!  We worked for months on this one and it still pains us here and there.  Our robot set up needs to be so precise on this one.  Even with perfect set up, the yaw sensor has a tendency to error causing our robot to miss its turn to target or just lose its bearings all together and spin.  We contacted Lego education about this issue and they eventually sent us replacement Spike Hubs.  For now, we sometimes take a penalty if it spins.  Otherwise this is a 150 point run. 

This year has been challenging.  We did our best to plan things out and make improvements based on test data. We kept track of this in our engineering notebook and dry erase boards. We are hopeful that our hard work will pay off on the competition floor.  

In one season, which begins in August and ends in April, team members are presented with a real-world problem. Much like a science fair, they have to conduct research to identify which aspect of the problem they will address and design a solution to that problem. This often involves inventing a new product or concept, or improving on an existing one. They are allowed to seek help from experts and team mentors. 

The amount of time and effort they put into researching the problem, designing the solution and constantly improving is up to each team. However, teams who truly embrace and exhibit FIRST Core values of innovation, discovery, inclusion, teamwork, impact, and fun will advance at competitions. 

To compete, each team will put together a presentation and share their innovation projects problem and solution with a demonstration of their actual prototype for their solution. They can accomplish this presentation with show-me posters, fact sheets, dioramas, or whatever else supports their research and findings. Teams are also encouraged to share their projects with their local community members and their outreach is part of their overall performance.

There’s more, they also compete with robots on a FLL Challenge table with complicated missions for their robot to left, pull, push, spin, or leverage. The robot itself must not be more than a square foot, including possible robot attachments. This event can be very high pressure and teams must maintain their gracious professionalism throughout the event.