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Core Values at the Tournament

amomentmaker

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When we went to the FIRST LEGO League regional championship tournament in our area, we were impressed by all of the examples of Core Values that we saw from the teams! The FIRST Core Values are a list of guidelines of how teams should act. They promote teamwork and “Coopertition” both within and between teams, as well as encouraging everyone to always treat others with “Gracious Professionalism.” This year FIRST made a list of consolidated Core Values across its different levels. In today’s article, we would like to share with you some examples of these Core Values being displayed at our tournament.

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Countdown on Hold…

amomentmaker

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Due to a facilities problem, our regional championship was canceled at the last minute. We want to thank FIRST and all the volunteers who had already spent countless hours planning and setting everything up for the tournament before the cancellation needed to occur.

We were of course very saddened to hear the news of the tournament being postponed. We sincerely hope that the championship will be able to be successfully rescheduled this year, so that all the teams will have an opportunity to share all that they have learned, accomplished, and worked so hard on this year.

Please excuse us from our regular blog post entries as we continue to prepare for our regional championship.

We know many FLL regions have already had their championships, but we want to wish good luck to teams who haven’t yet finished their competitions! Also, we want to wish good luck to all teams who have already moved on to preparing for a World Festival or another invitational!

LEGO Inspiration: 42057 Ultralight Helicopter

amomentmaker

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In LEGO Inspiration today, we will show you what we found interesting in LEGO Technic set number 42057 Ultralight Helicopter.

Our squishy mango friend insisted on taking the wheel for our opening picture! This article covers only one of the two models that can be built with this set. This is one of the smaller LEGO Technic sets, but perhaps the neatest thing about it is the fact that it is so compact and simplistic but capable of doing so much. There are great examples of transverse gearing, gear trains, and pivot points controlling steering!

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LEGO Fidget Spinners

amomentmaker

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Today we are going to talk about having fun with your Technic and EV3 pieces. For our FLL team, part of sitting around and building robots and attachments involves build “doodling.” We are not doodling on paper. We are “doodling” with the LEGO pieces themselves! We are building little structures as we mess with the pieces, learning how they work and coming up with new ideas. One of our recent ideas was to make LEGO Technic fidget spinners!

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EV3 Programming: Switch Blocks Part 1

amomentmaker

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Switch blocks in EV3 programming specify what you want the programming to do for two or more different conditions: “if EV3 detects this do this or if EV3 detects that do something else”. In other kinds of programming, you will often see this called “If…then…else” with maybe even “else…if.” In this article we will show you the many different options the EV3 software gives you.

Since the switch block has so many different options we decided to split talking about switch blocks into 2 articles. This one will be about every option besides the sensor options. We are currently working on an article about the different sensor options.

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LEGO Inspiration: 42069 Extreme Adventure

amomentmaker

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In LEGO Inspiration today, we will show you what we found interesting in LEGO Technic set number 42069 Extreme Adventure.

This is one of the larger LEGO Technic sets, but with its size comes lots of cool gearing and features. We have found many neat and inspiring things about this set. We named ours “Purple Snow” because of its color and because it was shown on the box with a snow background. We sometimes have our pom-pom owls that we made drive in it because they are the perfect size. We have had lots of fun with this set!

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