St. Louis School to Host Regional Robotics Tournament

This year St. Louis School in Owensville, Ohio will be hosting a Regional Qualifying Tournament for the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Robotics program on December 5th. FIRST, which stands for “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”, sponsors annual competitions for students from kindergarten through high school. The stated goal is for teams to apply math and science concepts to real-world problems. While solving the challenge, teams also tackle how to research a problem, how to work as a team, how to make formal presentations, and other related topics. The FLL part of the program is targeted at students ages 9-14.

National FLL organizers come up with a new theme each year and devise theme-related challenges. After the challenge release in September, teams have approximately 8 weeks to strategize, design, build, program, and test a robot using LEGO MINDSTORMS® technology and create innovative solutions for challenges facing today’s scientists as part of their research project.

FLL Competitions are scored in 4 distinct areas: Robot challenge matches, technical judging of the robot, a research project with a 5 minute presentation, and teamwork interviews/problem solving. This year the middle school program features 17,000 teams worldwide, with 9,500 teams in the United States and 335 teams in Ohio. There are over 60 teams in the Cincinnati region alone. Beginning in December Teams will be competing in Regional Tournaments for slots in the 60 team State Tournament in February. Winners at the state level will advance to the National and International level.

This year's FLL challenge is Body Forward, a biomedical engineering-themed challenge. For the robot-building portion of the competition, students must design and built a robot that will accomplish a series of objectives laid out on an 8-foot-by-4-foot "playing field," including: setting a bone; going around some playing-field features but knocking over others; placing a stent in an artery; and delivering personnel and medicine to the correct area. For the research portion of the challenge team members are challenged to pick a part of the body, study it to find out what sort of problems occur with it, and then design a treatment using biomedical engineering to either cure, repair, or enhance the body part. Teams are also asked to be able to consider the ethics of any solutions that they come up with.

St. Louis school will have 2 teams at this event. The Technico Gear Heads sponsored by SAP, which is coached by Phil Smith and Jay Schafer, and the LEGO Legend Crusaders coached by Jolene and Jill Esz. This is the 3rd year for the program at the school, and there are currently 12 students in grades 4-8 on both teams. The hope is to increase participation in the program within the school and the community. The robot challenge portion of the event will be 2:30-4:30PM on Dec 5 in the school gym, and is free and open to the public.