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Core Values Teamwork Challenges
COVID-19 has changed lives all over the world in many ways. We are very grateful that FIRST LEGO League will be able to continue this year. Obviously, though, the season this year is going to look very different for all teams.
One aspect of FIRST LEGO League that has always been fun is doing core values challenges within our teams. Core values challenges are great ways to build teamwork skills and grow closer as a team. However, social distancing makes it hard to participate in many of the standard ones. In this article, we will share with you 3 core values challenges that we came up with for our own team that can be completed virtually (such as over Zoom, Facetime, etc.) or in-person (with masks and social distancing of course!).
EV3 Programming: Building MyBlocks
Today we are going to talk about “MyBlocks.” MyBlocks allow you to create your own programming blocks (AKA subroutines or functions) made up of any combination of EV3 blocks already available! How cool is that? As you program your EV3, MyBlocks can be very helpful and can help take your code to the next level!
LEGO Inspiration: Duplo Motorized Train
In LEGO Inspiration today, we will show you what we found interesting in the current LEGO DUPLO train sets.
Even though these LEGO DUPLO sets are “geared” (haha) more for ages 2-5, these trains have features that help the next generation to learn about robotics. We really like that sets like these help kids (that might not even be old enough yet for FIRST LEGO League) to consider different ways to use “blocks” to tell a robot what to do, as well as learn about sensors. Maybe these sets will get all kids, girls and boys, interested in robotics!
Have Fun With Your EV3 and Power Functions
While we were creating our project prototype out of LEGOs, we found awesome aftermarket equipment from a company called Mindsensors that allows an EV3 to be able to talk to a Power Functions IR Receiver, enabling an EV3 to control LEGO Power Functions! Power Functions is a sub-section of LEGO that is mostly used in older motorized LEGO Technic sets, LEGO train sets, and the original WeDo. LEGO Power Functions included motors of different sizes, as well as lights. The Mindsensors’ PFMate controller can hook up to an EV3 with just a regular EV3 wire! Mindsensors also has a downloadable EV3 block already available! These Mindsensors after-market components are not made by LEGO, though, so they cannot be used as part of the FIRST LEGO League robot game (actually, even the Power Functions elements are excluded from the robot game). However, they might help you with developing a project prototype (how we discovered them) or you may just want to use them for fun with your EV3! In this article, we will show you how this interesting after-market component is used.
LEGO Inspiration: 41194 Noctura’s Tower & the Earth Fox Rescue
In LEGO Inspiration today, we will show you what we found interesting in LEGO Elves set number 41194 Noctura’s Tower & the Earth Fox Rescue.
This is one of the medium-sized LEGO Elves sets, but even though it’s “geared” (haha) more for girls it has a lot of important things to consider using in your FLL attachments or robot. We really like that sets like these help kids (that might not even be old enough yet for FLL) to consider different ways to have gears, chains, rotating beams, and other moving parts bring function to their play sets. Maybe these sets will get all kids, girls and boys, interested in robotics!
#FIRSTLikeAGirl Women in STEM Build Event
Some of our team had the awesome opportunity to attend the Houston area #FIRSTLikeAGirl Women in STEM Build Event at Space Center Houston today. We had some great talks about what it means to be allies for each other in STEM. We also had fun helping to encourage all the rookie FIRST girls as they start their own great robotics journeys with their teams. It was also great to be inspired by FIRST teams older than us, as well as females in engineering.
Gears: Types of Gears
Gears are everywhere, from seemingly simple toys to as complex things as cars. We think that it is amazing that LEGO Technic has incorporated so many gears into their sets to create functioning machines or robots to be used in FLL (FIRST LEGO League). In addition, many other LEGO themes such as City and Friends have used gears for many of their special functions. In this article, we will show you the types of gears as well as their uses.
LEGO Inspiration: 42062 Container Yard Part 2
In LEGO Inspiration today, we will continue showing you what we found interesting in LEGO Technic set number 42062 Container Yard.
This is one of the medium-sized LEGO Technic sets, but even though it’s small it has lots of cool gearing and use of connectors. It is a 2-in-1 set, so it also has available instructions to build a container straddle-carrier, but for this article we will deal with the main instructions for the 2 container yard vehicles. Of these two vehicles, we will focus on the blue and white one in this article as “part 2” about this set (see “part 1” for orange vehicle).
LEGO Inspiration: 42062 Container Yard Part 1
In LEGO Inspiration today, we will show you what we found interesting in LEGO Technic set number 42062 Container Yard.
This is one of the medium-sized LEGO Technic sets, but even though it’s small it has lots of cool gearing and use of connecters. It is a 2-in-1 set, so it also has available instructions to build a container straddle-carrier, but for this article we will deal with the main instructions for the 2 container yard vehicles. Of these two vehicles, we will focus on the orange one in this article as “part 1” about this set. We have found many neat and inspiring things about this vehicle.
The Moment Makers 
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