Our awesome robot, JACK, won awards last time, but for this new season, we found out JACK's design won't work. When JACK tried carrying the Masterpiece and Anna to the museum, it wobbled a lot and couldn't stay steady.

Our mentor said we should look at LEGO Advanced Driving Base design. We thought it was cool because it's really steady and our robot can carry stuff easily. Plus, it lets us use two arms together. That way, we don't waste time switching arms during the game and we won't mess up when we change them.

We liked the ADB to begin with. Our coach said we needed sensors for our missions, so we added distance and color sensors to it. But wow, it was hard! We had to take off the whole front of the robot and redo the bottom just for these two sensors. Also, we added extra support to make it stable. We called this new robot MARC, after our team!

First we had a "Box" arm to attempt audience and expert delivery missions. But that arm didn't work well for other missions. We didn't want to spend a lot of time swapping the arms, so we went with a new "fork" design instead. This design helped us in several missions. We decided to use this as the primary (front facing) arm. We then made a "harpoon" arm to help with flick and pull missions. We made the "L" hook a bit smaller and added a rubber piece to help grip better and avoid arm slipping.

We played with Lego WordBlocks to tell our robots what to do. We figured out lots of cool new blocks using sensors, like ones for sensing distance, colors, and even how much the robot spins. We made our own special code blocks for making the robot go forward, backward, left, and right. We measured how far the robot moved using inches, how the arm moved using rotations, and the direction it faced using degrees.

Our coach wanted us to make the robot easier to control, so we put arrows on it to show which way it was going. That helped a ton when we had to use it in the competition! After each mission, we made sure the robot's arms went back to their starting spots. And for some missions, we set the arms to go to certain positions at the beginning.

It was super fun, and we learned a bunch of new skills for coding with WordBlocks this time around!