Tin Mint Blog

This past Saturday we had the oppurtunity to go to the Ridley Park Victorian Fair. We demonstrated Rosie, sold a lot of brushel brushes and T-shirts, and talked about our team to everyone who walked by. We even sold a few flocks of flamingos, which is turning out to be a great fundraiser! There were several people who were very interested in our team and our accomplishments, and we even encouraged a few girls to try robotics out! All the girls and parents did a great job promoting our team and helping to run our table.

Last week we had a party where we made flamingos. We outlined, cut, and painted the flamingos, and they turned out even better than we hoped. We plan to use these flamingos as a fundraiser that we call “flocking.” Flocking is when you place flamingos on the lawns of family and friends and leave a note explaining that they must pay a certain amount to get the flamingos removed from their front yard or to have them placed on another person’s yard. We are hopeful that this fundraiser will be successful, and we look forward to flocking our first house!

We are so excited for the new challenge this year, titled “World Class Learning Unleashed.” Watch the teaser here:
http://www.firstlegoleague.org/challenge/2014fllworldclass

In honor of this season’s challenge, Jr. FLL created a desk and chair using LEGOs…

And FLL made a list of “what would make school better.”

The official release date for World Class is August 26th. We’re thinking that there will be plenty of color sensors for the girls to program!

On Saturday, May 3, we held a STEM workshop for younger Girl Scouts. They learned about all levels of FIRST, especially FLL. They learned how to build and program an NXT robot using Mindstorms, played fun games, and built a “brushel bot,” made out of floor scrubbers and vibrating toothbrushes. They had a lot of fun making the brushel bots, especially because they got to decorate them! We also demonstrated our robots from the past two seasons, Rosie and Rosie 2. The girls, and their moms, were in awe of both robots, and loved seeing our first Rosie shooting frisbees. They took home the GSEP FIRST Robotics Patrol STEM patch to place on the back of their vests.

Miss Laurel talking about FIRST

Building NXT robots

We would just like to congratulate every team that is moving on to the Championships in St. Louis, which include but are not limited to:
-Teams 2590, 11, and 341, the winners of the overall competition
-Teams 1218 and 303, the Chairman’s Award winners
-Teams 25 and 1676, our Engineering Inspiration competition
-And all the other teams moving on.

The Tin Mints thoroughly enjoyed this past weekend. On Friday, we had our EI interview, and we feel like we did our best. Saturday was quite eventful, what with the alliance selection and elimation rounds. A few Girl Scouts came to see us, which was so exciting! Since we did not bring our robot with us, we showed the girls some other teams’ robots, including Team 357, who was our mentor team during our rookie season last year. The girls were able to see some of the matches up close, and they thought it was so cool! Also, as an aside, I would like to shoutout to the kid from Team 4954 taking selfies with all the teams. It was a pretty cool idea.

Good luck to the teams competing at Lehigh University for the MAR Championships today. We’ll see you later when we get interviewed for EI this evening (or we are already there, depending on the person).

Exactly one year ago, we were on the FOX 29 morning news to promote our team and the MAR Championships. Notice our nervousness/awkwardness?

http://www.myfoxphilly.com/video?clipId=8760436&autostart=true

We are so excited to go camping this weekend with our Jr. FLL and FLL girls, as well as other Girl Scouts, at Camp Laughing Waters. We think it is very important to do activities with our younger girls, and we have made so many friends because of these connections through robotics.

I thought I would do a Throwback Thursday picture today. Here’s a photo of the Smart Cookies from our first competitive year for FLL, way back in the day (just kidding, it’s from 2012). Ahh, programming an NXT robot, learning about and coming up with a solution to a real world problem, and teaching others about Core Values. Those were the days…

All 54 teams are registered for MAR, and we are not one of them. However, we are completely fine with this, and we are excited to go to MAR for Engineering Inspiration, even though we will not be competing. What can I say? We’re so excited, and we just can’t hide it. Good luck to the other teams and we will see you there.