Lego Robotics

BE SURE TO JOIN THE ROBOTICS GOOGLE CLASSROOM! 

New season for QPS Citywide is RePLAY. Check out the google classroom for the notebooks. Missions video:

Spring robotics is a little different than the fall.

  • All grades can attend Monday or Tuesday or both. 
  • new permission slip IS REQUIRED for ALL participants
  • there will be six teams attending from Central
  • citywide competition is Saturday May 18th

Non-participants will be asked to leave.

Please be thinking about your team and who is on it. Remember that to be in the competition your team will need to do the research project as well as the robot missions. 

Central Competition

For this we had just the missions on the table and scored each team for three rounds of two and a half minutes. The top score is the one that is used for the final result. The winners were the CyberRAMS with our other teams performing well. We have three excellent grade six teams and are looking forward to seeing how they do in the Citywide competition in the spring.

Revere Qualifier

A great game was had by all, and it was exciting until the end. Our three teams competed well at the table and scored highly. Smurf Cats were most consistent and ended 6th, Civil War were 12th and CyberRAMS 14th, out of 40 teams. The programming was clever, the planning and design excellent. The judging was done differently this year and the teams did not perform well in that part of the competition. So despite one of our teams being in the top ten, the other aspects of the competition meant that they did not secure a spot in the next round. It was a good learning opportunity and for that team at least, they can try again next year. 

 

Lego Robotics at Central Middle School 

What we do at Central:

  • grade 6 meet on Tuesday

  • grade 7+8 meet on Monday

  • coaches are Mrs Mastico and Ms Rusch

  • we have 11 robot brains to work with

  • students form teams of 2-10 members

  • we work towards the FLL challenge of the season

  • three teams compete in the regional qualifier at Revere High School, December 9th.

  • the other teams compete in an in-school challenge

The new season has launched - here's a quick overview:

 

and this is a breakdown of the missions:

City Shapers

A fantastic day at QHS. The teams of Central dominated the table all morning, Bing Chilling scored more than double all but the second team and beat them by a solid third. More importantly, they worked well together to get this score and were consistently the best in all four rounds. They earned the prestigious Robot Performance Award for this top score and the Mechanical Design because of their consistency.

The six Central teams came back with eight awards. They won for their innovation project, for inspiration, for programming skills, and teamwork. An impressive showing. There were frustrations, as always, but they handled themselves with aplomb and all but a couple can be back next year to try again. (In high school they have Hyper 69 robotics and no longer FLL.)

What is the Robotics program at Central?

Lego Robotics is run by Ms. Mastico and Ms Rusch. It is mostly focused on the First Lego League robotics competition. A table has missions to be completed,  the students build and program the robot that will do as many of those tasks as possible. 

Fall robotics

The year begins with the international First Lego League competition. Students are organized into teams of two to ten people, and develop a robot to do this year’s tasks. This year we have been promised three teams to be entered into the official regional FLL qualifier and they move on to State if successful. The three official teams are also required to complete a research and design project that complements the theme of the challenge.

After the qualifier, there will be an in-house competition to see who built the best one. Following this there will be a challenge arranged by your coaches, one year was burglar alarms, the next was Sumo bots. This challenge is only at Central and is informal. 

Spring robotics

Later in the spring, Quincy hosts the President's Cup, a citywide competition between the middle schools. This is usually a past FLL challenge and consists of all the aspects of an official competition.

Signing up

It is a very competitive program, especially at the beginning while everyone is figuring out what they want to do (there are a lot of options at Central).  There are a lot of students and not a lot of places in the club. In order to manage the requests, students must stop by the library before or after school, or at SSB in order to get a permission slip.