Hello everyone we are two of the Trashmendous members, Ella and Imogen, reporting from Gordon East Robotics Room. Recently we attended the First Lego League regional competition! There were many awesome and tough teams, 35 to be exact (if you include us it was 36). But, only four of those teams made it to Nationals. And guess what? We were one of those teams! Along with making it to Nationals, we also received the award for  Gracious Professionalism. We received an exemplary score in all areas of Gracious Professionalism. Below we will be explaining the different aspects of the competition and how we completed them. Hope you enjoy!

 

One third of the score that we needed to achieve belonged to the Project. For our project, we looked at Food Waste and its terrible impact on us humans. We worked out ways to help people not waste perfectly fine fruits, veggies and foods! For our project, we needed to come up with an Innovative Solution for our problem at hand. We had four. Our first Innovative Solution was the Food Swap. This was where students could bring food that they definitely wouldn’t eat up to our table and trade it in for another piece of food that they will eat. People who didn’t have enough food could also come up to our table and pick something to eat. When we came up with the idea, we thought it would definitely work! We even had a motto! “Hey dude eat your food! If you don’t like what’s made make a trade!” But, I guess we were proved wrong. Not many people came up to our table to trade in or pick up food. We thought this happened because it was a Canteen Day and some kids might not have been comfortable with trading food.

 

So we moved onto our next Innovative Solution. Operation Apple. Operation Apple was where kids would bring in apples from home and we would slinky them for them. We decided to do Operation Apple when we saw lots of perfectly fine apples thrown away in our bins. We purchased Apple Slinkies for each of the classes at our school and we hope that students will use them and make good use of them.

 

Operation Apple was a great success. Each child seemed to enjoy their apples once they were slinkied. Our next Innovative Solution was Mission Survey. Mission Survey was where we sent out a Survey to the whole school. The survey was titled: “Why Do You Throw Out Food At School?” We used the Survey creation tool called Google Forms. Once everyone had answered, we collected the results and graphed them. We then analysed the Graphs.

 

Our last Innovative Solution was Project Portions. Project Portions was where we educated the students and their parents on reducing portion sizes. We spoke to the canteen volunteers about how they can reduce portion sizes. We thought this worked really well. All of these Innovative Solutions made our problem easier to conquer. But still, perfectly fine pieces of food are being thrown out around the world. You can help to stop this by taking our solutions and applying them in your own life to help the world.

 

 

 

Another third of our score was dedicated to The Robot Games. The Robot Games was where your NXT robot was programmed to complete a bunch of challenges across the Game Board. We chose to complete these challenges: Compost, Demolition, Transport, Scrap Cars and Careers. Compost was where your robot had to press a button and wait 20 seconds for a piece of puck to come out. Demolition is where your robot has to knock over a building. We chose to ram it over instead of pulling down the lever. Transport was where your robot had to push a lego truck across a line of Lego. Once the truck reached the middle of the line, the truck picked up a yellow container. The truck then had to dump that container off at the end of the track. Scrap Cars was where your robot had to either fold up the car or place an engine found at base into it to repair it. We chose to place the engine into it. The last challenge that we completed was Careers. Careers was where your robot had to push two people into the area where the Sorter lies. For the regional competition, we only tried to go for Demolition, Scrap Cars and Compost. We only just recently achieved Careers and Transport and will be using them for the competition.

 

Another third of the score was core values, This was to identify a team who showed exemplary teamwork,  A clear explanation on our efficiency and effectiveness as working in Trashmendous team. To identify the impact we give to our other peers for both elders and kids through our inspiration, Which showed Team spirit, Integration and Discovery. Best of all they were looking for Gracious professionalism , identifying Inclusion, Respect and Coopertition. All the judges across the board we looking for two aspects and they were to HAVE FUN and WORK AS A TEAM! 😀

 

All in all, the competition day was extremely fun but very competitive at the same time. We would just like to congratulate all of the other teams that competed. You deserved our place in Nationals as much as we did. Congratulations to all of the teams who won awards and made it to Nationals as well. Imogen and Ella, reporting from the Gordon East Lego Robotics Room, signing out. Thank you.