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FIRST LEGO League is an international competition organized by FIRST.<br />
Every year, they release a challenge, which is based of real-world problems<br />
such as food safety, recycling, water conservation, etc. Each challenge has<br />
three parts, Project, Robot, and Core Values. For the project, teams are<br />
challenged to identify a problem within that topic, come up with a solution,<br />
and create a prototype. The teams also have to build and program a robot<br />
using LEGO MINDSTORMS technology to complete missions on a game board<br />
within 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Everyone is also required to follow the Core<br />
Values, by being gracious professionals, working as a team, having fun, etc.<br />
This year’s challenge was Hydrodynamics. We were required to create a<br />
solution to a problem relating to water. We decided that instead of conserving<br />
water, we should just make more! So we researched more about this idea,<br />
and we were inspired by Star Wars to create the Thermoelectric Cooler, or<br />
TEC for short. The TEC is a device that super cools the air around it, and<br />
ice forms onto it. We then reverse the polarity of the Heat Sink and Cooler,<br />
so we can melt the ice into water. So basically, we were making water from<br />
the air. Our idea was that we could expand this into a shipping container size,<br />
so we could help people in hurricanes, earthquakes, or even war. According<br />
to our calculations, we could provide water for a minimum of 200 people per<br />
day.<br />
After we had our project figured out, we decided to split into two teams and<br />
work on both the project and robot at the same time. I was on the robot<br />
team. The first robot we made probably hated us, because it refused to do<br />
most of the things we programmed it to do. We decided to name it Defiance,<br />
since that seemed pretty fitting. Thankfully, our second robot had much better<br />
Core Values, so it became Compliance. Maybe Compliance was rubbing off<br />
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