Weedsport’s Lego League is wrapping up a successful season of programming. Six students participated in this year’s Lego League: Benson Bozeat, Cody Foltz, Sage Howard, Grayson McNabb, Tucker Munn and Gabe Overend.  

Students met twice each week from October through January, where they constructed Lego missions, and placed them on a Lego map for this year’s competition. When a mission was complete, students turned to their Spike Prime robots, programming them to complete as many of the 15 missions that they could. 

“Students learned how to program the robot to move forward, backward, make turns and instruct attachments to do work that would complete the missions,” explained teacher Jeanette Mitchell.

 For instance, the robot had to push a bar to release circular “energy units” that then made a windmill spin. Another mission released “oil units” when a bar at the oil plant was lifted by the arm attachment connected to our robot. 

The FIRST Lego League Competition took place at the end of January at Cayuga Onondaga BOCES. On competition day, our Weedsport team ran the robot game three times, where they tried to complete as many missions as possible in two and a half minutes. The highest score of all three counted towards the overall score for the “Weedsport Units,” the school’s team name. The “Weedsport Units” three scores were 185, 150, and 150.

“We were very pleased with our robot game scores for our first time competing,” added Mitchell. “I was very pleased with the way our team worked together and pushed through some obstacles, especially early in the season!”

On competition day, participating students took part in three presentations: Innovation Project, Robot Design and Core Values. For the Innovation Project, students researched an energy problem our world faces today, and presented a solution to a panel of judges.

During the Robot Design presentation, the teams explained their reasoning for attacking certain missions on the game board, and how they built their robot to perform those missions.

For the third presentation, Core Values,  students were presented with everyday objects to build the tallest free-standing tower they could. Once they built it, they then explained how they used First Lego League’s Core Values (Discovery, Teamwork, Fun, Innovation, Impact, Inclusion) during that activity and throughout the season. Mitchell said the “Weedsport Units” were strongest in this category.