20th Issue

Team
Competition
All reds at the FLL 2021 Competition
CKY won 3rd place in the best robot design award
Competition highlights
The First Lego League (FLL) is a robotics competition where as a
team we had to build and program a robot to accomplish some tasks
in a set amount of time. Due to the pandemic, this year’s competition
was shifted online, and we could film the whole competition then
submit it online. Afterwards we would join a zoom meeting and
explain the design of our robot and the building process, as well as
present a research project about our innovative design on a preset
topic.
This competition really focuses on their core values such as
discovery, innovation, impact, inclusion, teamwork and fun. There
was a whole section of the competition where the judges asked
questions about our teamwork, what problems we encountered
during the competition and how we solved them, and potential
improvements for our robot. This was really interesting as I usually
don’t see competition with such emphasis on these values.
We played to our strengths and split the workload according to our
fields of expertise, such as building the robot, or programming the
robot. At the start I mooched around for the most part, as I was the
most inexperienced member of the robotics team, so I stood and
learnt from my teammates, contributing with the occasional
constructive idea and helping out whenever I could, such as copying
a piece of the robot that needed to be built multiple times. My
greatest contribution to the team was sorting the pieces. It’s such an
underrated part of the process. I spent hour after hour separating
parts into different categories then placing them into the trays.
Eventually, once I started to get the hang of how to actually help out
with preparing for the competition, I helped out with some of the
programming, which involved a lot of trial and error. This was
especially annoying as the robot’s motion sensor was very
inaccurate, and the system had a high margin of error, meaning that
the robot did a slightly different thing every time, so we couldn’t really
test the robot accurately. We joked while recording the competition
that the robot only worked when it wasn’t being filmed, but kept
failing whenever we were.
I learnt many technical skills during the competition, such as how to
build a robot, and how the individual parts interacted with each other
to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. I also learned how
to think outside of the box, using creative ways to solve problems,
such as bumping into the wall to align the robot so it is more
accurate.
Overall, the First Lego League was an amazing experience. 10/10 I
would certainly recommend.
Daniel Au 10A
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