Author: amomentmaker

LEGO Inspiration: 70008 Gorzan’s Gorilla Striker

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In LEGO Inspiration today, we will show you what we found interesting in LEGO Legends of Chima set number 70008 Gorzan’s Gorilla Striker.

This is a discontinued LEGO set from The LEGO Legends of Chima series. In Chima, Gorzan and other members of the gorilla tribe use these mechs to swing from vines and walk/run to cover more distance than they could with just their minifigure bodies. The mech’s arms move to help grab the vines, defend themselves, pick up people and things, and make hand gestures, like when they need to give directions to the rhinos.

This set offers a lot of movement with LEGO joints for fingers,  hips, and knees, as well as several missile sites. However, for the purpose of helping EV3 builders and FLL teams, we are going to focus on the gearing that allows the arms to move up and down by turning a knob in the mech’s back.

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“Into Orbit” Kick-off Celebration for ACES-East

amomentmaker

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On Saturday, September 5, our local FIRST LEGO League (FLL) organization hosted a Kick-off Celebration for the Into Orbit 2018-2019 season at Space Center Houston. This is Houston’s first year to be part of ACES for FIRST in Texas. Some of the team was sick and couldn’t come, but luckily one of team mascots was able to make it — BURN-E our FIRST bear!

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Remember to Have Fun with Your EV3!

amomentmaker

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One of the FLL core values is about having fun and enjoying what we do. Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in using LEGO EV3 for FIRST LEGO League, to learn about simple and complex machines, or for other schoolwork. FIRST encourages us to have fun while we do our work. But, it is good to remember to make sure you take some time to have a break and to just have fun, too! When you have time, you should make up your own missions and challenges! By making your own challenges you can learn, have fun, and take a break from all the stressing work of robotics.

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Crabs, Couches, and Armchairs: Building Pieces for Extra Support

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When you are building with LEGO Technic, sometimes you need extra supporting pieces on beams to keep your model from falling apart when you handle it. This is especially important for LEGO robots used for competition. We thought up some ways over the past three years to help with this problem. We will share some of those in this blog post.

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LEGO Inspiration: 41237 Batgirl Secret Bunker

amomentmaker

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In LEGO Inspiration today, we will show you what we found interesting in DC Super Hero Girls LEGO set number 41237 Batgirl Secret Bunker.

For many LEGO sets we took for granted the Technic elements within them. We decided to look back at some of these sets and show you the things we thought might help in your building efforts. We can learn a lot from LEGO Master Builders!

This set is really cool. So many parts are moveable by using Technic. We will go through the set, section by section.

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The Extra Beam!

amomentmaker

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LEGO is pretty generous. In all of their sets, they have some extra pieces that are left over after following building instructions, but LEGO only gives you very small extra pieces, like studs, connectors, half bushes, etc. LEGO almost never gives you large extra pieces. If you have a large piece left over after building a set, check through the instructions again to see if you missed putting that piece in the model as part of the steps. In recent LEGO sets, each step has an inventory listed for the step. To avoid leaving pieces out while we build, we like to find the pieces for each step and make sure we use them all before moving on. When we have a large piece like a full brick or beam left over, we scan the inventory listed for each step to look for the type/color of piece we have left over. Usually, we find the step we overlooked that piece. It has happened to us many times in different LEGO sets we build.

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