FIRST Lego League

Past Missions
2003 Mission to Mars
 2004 No Limits
 2005 Ocean Odyssey
      8th grade Team Page
 
2006 NanoQuest
2007 PowerPuzzle
2008 Climate Connection
      6th grade project page
 
     
 

FIRST LEGO LEAGUE: What is it?

This is Prince of Peace Catholic School's seventh year participating in the FIRST Lego League. Sponsored by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) in conjunction with the Lego Corporation, the FLL's goal is to get students ages 9 - 14 interested in science and technology. Every year FIRST issues a challenge, and then gives students 8 weeks to design, build, and program a robot that can fulfill as many elements of the challenge as possible. In the process students learn problem-solving, science, math, engineering design, and critical thinking skills, using real-world applications. More importantly,  robotics teaches students the skills and teamwork necessary to be part of tomorrow's technical workforce.

This Year's Challenge:

 
Each and every day, transportation touches your lives. Your team travels to the places where they learn, to the places where they play, to visit friends and family. Things we want, clothes we wear, the food we eat, the water we drink, medicines we need—all these travel over highways, on paths and trails, along railroad tracks, up and down rivers, across oceans, over mountains and deserts, along the streets we live on. Information travels to us from experts, teachers, friends, and family. It comes to us by word-of-mouth, over the phone, in books, from websites, in text messages.

Now, consider. A potato chip can travel through a factory—flying from machine-to-machine without being broken—but more than 50,000 kids who traveled on skateboards had to be taken to the hospital. Is all this travel as safe as it could be? Millions of people (and the things they need) get stuck in transit every day. Is all this travel as efficient as it could be?

Your challenge this season is to look at your community and discover how people, animals, information, and things travel. Once you know how people and things move in your community, pick one main mode of transportation and do some research. What kinds of problems keep people and things from getting where they are going safely? What kind of problems keep people and things from moving efficiently, getting where they are going quickly and using the least amount of energy? How could your team help solve one of those problems?