The Wrightwood Robotics team competed at the La Cañada First Lego League tournament on Sunday, November 12th. This is the second year that the robotics team from Wrightwood has competed in the league and the group has grown significantly within the last year by recruiting more members. This year, the Wrightwood Robotics team doubled in size and is now comprised of two teams, each with ten members of elementary and middle school-age students. The younger team, Robot Rangers, tied for 14th place, which helped them qualify for the Regional Tournament. The older team, Wrightwood Robotics, also qualified for Regionals and placed 8th out of 27 teams, where they took home the prestigious “Rising Star Award,” which is awarded to newer teams that show promising growth.
“The middle school age team is almost made up entirely of all new team members, and they scored well for their first time competing!” said Michelle Scharfe, who is also in her first year of co-coaching the robotics team alongside Ray Bryson, who formed the Wrightwood Robotics program last year. Michelle has a doctorate in engineering and completed her teaching credentials by working at Serrano High School as a Physics instructor last semester. Her love for science and passion for learning is exactly what the First Lego League Challenge is all about, which emphasizes STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) exploration.
The First Lego League competition includes four components: Robot design, a robot game, an innovation project, and representing core values. These four parts all add up to the team’s overall score.
The first component is a robotics game mission where the teams program their robots to complete a Lego obstacle course, which includes a series of missions. Each team has 2 minutes and 30 seconds to complete as many of the 15 missions as possible, and each mission has a score of about 20-40 points.
The teams also participate in a presentation section where they promote an innovative project and present it to a panel of judges. Each team is judged on their innovation and teamwork, as well as their answers to questions brought up during the Q&A section.
Throughout the competition, judges also take into consideration how the teams demonstrate the “First Core Values,” which emphasize teamwork, inclusion, discovery, fun, impact, and innovation. The top teams that score the most points at the end of the day are able to move on to the next level and qualify for the Regional Competition.
Ray Bryson has been coaching First Lego League robotics teams for the last 13 years and was impressed with the Wrightwood teams’ quick learning. “This team only meets once a week. They will be competing against schools who run this program after school every day,” said Ray, who is also the owner of the Wrightwood Place, which is where the team practices each week leading up to the big competition.
Ray is a retired school teacher and has experienced how competitive the First Lego League program is in larger cities throughout California. But despite their teams’ time constraints and rookie inexperience, both of the Wrightwood robotics teams overcame these drawbacks and attended the FLL La Canada Regional Southern California Tournament on December 3rd.
A total of 38 teams competed at the Regional Competition, where the Robot Rangers placed 16th, and the Wrightwood Robotics team placed 3rd. Although neither team qualified to advance to the next round, they represented Wrightwood well. They will apply their experiences toward next year’s robotic competition, where there will be new obstacles to complete and different problems to solve.
