Author: amomentmaker

We’re Going to the World Championship!

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Our FTC team 19502 competed at the FIRST in Texas State Championship in Belton on March 25-26. We were so excited to be the Tesla Division Finalist Alliance Captain and to win 3rd place Inspire!

We moved on to the World Championship in Houston and can’t wait to meet teams from around the world! We made a robot reveal video on our stat page here, where we also have videos of some of our best matches from the State Championship! If you are in Houston for the World Championship, please come and visit us at our pit!

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New Pieces Found in SUPERPOWERED Field Kit

amomentmaker

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FIRST LEGO League SUPERPOWERED launched on August 2, along with the Mission Model Building Instructions! When building our models for the SUPERPOWERED field kit, our team found some neat relatively new LEGO Technic pieces that will be a great resource for using in your LEGO Technic builds, whether for FLL robots or for your own projects! Check them out, learn part numbers, and find out how to purchase more of these exciting pieces.

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Getting Started with the LEGO SPIKE Essential

amomentmaker

Are you interested in trying out SPIKE Essential with your family, in your classroom, or in your FIRST LEGO League Explore team? We will walk you through the SPIKE Essential set from LEGO Education, including the building and robot components, the programming software, and the unit plans. We show a completed build and program for the “Snack Stand” unit plan, along with some student-made modifications to the build and program. Our previous website article talks through the features in more depth, too. Check it out here.

If you have any questions or would like mentoring for your FLL team, please contact us.

Transitioning from FLL to FTC: Forming a Team

amomentmaker

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Transitioning from FIRST LEGO League Challenge to FIRST Tech Challenge may seem rather frightening. It is normal to be scared of something new, but FIRST Tech Challenge brings its own awesome opportunities. Last year our team moved from FIRST LEGO League to FIRST Tech Challenge. It may seem like a big jump, but the programs are remarkably similar!

This article discusses the changes and similarities between FLL and FTC in the team structure and formation. We will post other articles outlining other differences, such as the robot game, the actual robot, competition structure, judging, awards, and advancement. Stay tuned!

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SUPERPOWERED Preseason Materials

amomentmaker

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The 2022-2023 FIRST LEGO League Challenge season will launch on August 2, 2022. If your team is so excited that you just can’t wait to start thinking of the possibilities, this summer is a great time to start brainstorming with your team what next season might entail.

We created resources for teams as they begin investigating the new Robot Game and Innovation Project topic. The resources guide the exploration of the year’s topic and guessing the possible challenges. Explore ideas with your team! Learn something new!

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Innovation Project: Create and Iterate Your Prototype

amomentmaker

We created a video on how how to create and iterate your FIRST LEGO League team’s Innovation Project as you progress through the season by using one of our own past Innovation Projects as an example. We will talk about how we went from just a drawing of our solution idea, to a proof-of-concept prototype, to a full-sized functional model. We thank Droids Robotics and the Share & Learn Community for featuring our video as part of their FIRST LEGO League Challenge Rookie Team Webinar series.

New LEGO Education SPIKE Essential Set (#45345)

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We were excited to get to play with this 45345 LEGO Education SPIKE Essential Set. You can have fun learning about building LEGO machines and motorizing them with your own programs with the help of LEGO minifigures Maria, Daniel, Sophie, and Leo. Although this robotics set is geared for younger audiences than the SPIKE Prime or Mindstorms, it’s a great set for learning to love robotics and comes with lots of awesome new pieces! Even adults may prefer using its smaller sized hub for compact building projects. We will give you an overview of the set and the software and let you know some of the aspects we really liked about it.

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Fun with EV3: LEGO Technic Ballerina

amomentmaker

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Whether you have a LEGO Mindstorms or a LEGO Spike, robots are so much fun! Just use your imagination to create your own robotic invention!

We had so much fun building a ballerina robot using an EV3 to control her dance and play her music. We named our robot “Minnie Fay,” after a character from the musical Hello Dolly!. We love ballet, and we thought that it would be fun to build a robot dancer! Robots can be anything that you have an interest in!

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How to Run EV3 Lab/EV3-G on an Up-to-Date Computer (even Macs)

amomentmaker

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Even though SPIKE Prime and the Mindstorms Robot Inventor Kit are here and are awesome tools, the EV3 is still here to stay for a lot of schools, teams, and home users. The current EV3 Classroom from LEGO Education has Scratch-based programming (similar to the SPIKE Prime and Mindstorms Robot Inventor Kit). However, many people have grown to love the older LabVIEW-based block language currently known as EV3 Lab/EV3-G. If you get a new Windows computer, you have to search a bit for the EV3 Lab download, but it will still run on even Windows 10. We will show you how below. However, do you have an updated Mac computer and are sad that you can no longer run the older EV3 programming language EV3 Lab/EV3-G on it? If your Mac computer is updated to 10.15 (Catalina) or higher, the old EV3 Lab software cannot run. However, we have figured out a way around this, so that you can have the best of both worlds – an up-to-date Mac and EV3 Lab successfully running.

Today, we are going to walk you through the steps we used to run EV3 Lab/EV3-G on current Windows and Mac computers. Please note that EV3 Lab will no longer be updated by LEGO Education, but it still has a place in many homes and schools.

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