First Lego League: By Michael Heneghan

What is the FLL – The FLL (First Lego League) is an international competition that takes place each year for ages 9-16. The overall winning team from each country goes on then to represent their country in the world finals. The competition consists of 3 sections on which you are judged, 1) Core values 2) your project and 3) the robot game.

Robot game – For this you must design and build a fully working Lego robot to do certain tasks. The tasks each robot does are called missions, and each mission carries different points. The more complex the mission, the more points you will be rewarded with. For the game itself you are given 2:30mins, to get as much points as possible.

Project – For the project you must come up with an innovative solution for a problem. To earn points you need to have your problem identification, innovative solution and an idea of how you’re going to share it with other people.

FLL for us

We started the FLL in October 2014. To begin, we started building the robot. We didn’t have any design plan; it was really hit or miss. At this time too, we started working on the project. We came up with the idea of www.framebyframesports.com. This is a website where users can view particular sports, frame by frame, to learn the skills necessary for each sport. The competition was held in the Radisson in Galway on the 24^th of January. There were 28 teams at the competition. We did quite well in the competition as we came  5^th in overall robot game and we won a trophy for the best research project.