2019 Moment Maker Tip #1

amomentmaker

We are two weeks away from our own qualifier competition. Our team wants to take this time to share our “Moment Maker” tips for this year with other teams to help them prepare for their own competitions. We will be sharing multiple tips throughout the next two weeks. During this time, we will take a break from our normal blog posts, so that our team can focus on preparing ourselves for our own competition. Good luck to all the teams! We will still be reading our “contact us” page, if you have any questions or comments for us.

The best part of tournaments is being able to share all of your hard work with other teams and the community! Remember to have fun sharing all you've learned! Take the time to talk to other teams to learn about their accomplishments, too!

LEGO Inspiration: 41194 Noctura’s Tower & the Earth Fox Rescue

amomentmaker

DSCF9394

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!

Continue reading →

#FIRSTLikeAGirl Women in STEM Build Event

amomentmaker

DSCF9960

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.

Continue reading →

Gears: Types of Gears

amomentmaker1 Comment

DSCF9260

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.

Continue reading →

LEGO Inspiration: 42062 Container Yard Part 2

amomentmaker

DSCF8010

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).

Continue reading →

LEGO Inspiration: 42062 Container Yard Part 1

amomentmaker2 Comments

DSCF8010

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.

Continue reading →

City Shaper Release and Upcoming Video

amomentmaker

DSCF8917

We are really excited for the 2019-2020 season in FIRST LEGO League! The theme this year is City Shaper! FIRST LEGO League (FLL) is such a great program for kids ages 9-14 years old (age restrictions are different in other parts of the world, so check for your region). Get involved if you can as a team member or coach! Even if you do not have time to be fully involved, you can still volunteer or attend the many tournaments across the world!!!

Continue reading →

Core Values at the Tournament

amomentmaker

DSCF7252

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.

Continue reading →

Countdown on Hold…

amomentmaker

DSCF7193

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!

We Love Angles!

amomentmaker1 Comment

dscf6649

As part of messing around with pieces and looking for angles to help fix a FLL attachment we were working on, one of our team members built this heart made out of angles. Angles are awesome! We kept this Technic “doodle” around to take pictures of it to share with you. So Happy St. Valentine’s Day and have fun learning about Technic angles!

Continue reading →