SECME and First Lego League

These weeekend was full of volunteering for me!

On Saturday I volunteered as a judge for SECME. Students registered in competitions for bottle rockets, gliders, bridges, posters, mousetrap race cars, posters and essays. SECME's (Science, Engineering, Communication, Mathematics, and Enrichment) goal is to renew and strengthen the professional capacity of K-12 educators, motivate and mentor students, and empower parents so that all students can learn and achieve at higher levels. This year's theme was Thinking Out of the Box.

The FIRST LEGO League State Competition Judging was held in Melbourne, FL. at the Florida Institute of Technology. FLL is a competition for teams of up to 10 students ages 9-14 years old. The competition consists of table matches (where their LEGO robot runs) and judging on the design and construction of the robot and software as well as how effective they operate as a team. In addition, they are required to conduct research on a topic related to the theme designated for the year (this year was Climate) and are judged on a presentation of their research.

The robots are constructed from LEGO Robotics kits and are programmed using either the LEGO Mindstorms software or Robolab software which is based on Labview. Software judges have the teams walk through their software and have them talk about the design and how effective their software is. Hardware judges have the teams demonstrate how their robot accomplishes the mission objectives and talk with the team members about how their robot is designed, why they made specific design decisions, etc.

View a Video the Robot Missions: Click Here!

This year I judged the teams on teamwork. They were given 5 minutes to complete 3 puzzles within their team. As judges, we observed the teams working together to solve the problems and then we asked them questions based on teamwork.