LEGO Inspiration: 42057 Ultralight Helicopter

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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

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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

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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

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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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FLL: Remember the 12” Ceiling in Base

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We attended our qualifier competition last week! We had a great time and made a lot of good friends. We want to pass on an experience some teams faced there. Some teams forgot the 12 inch ceiling in base during launch and had to quickly redesign their robot/attachments. We were sad for them that they could not run all of the mission runs they had planned, but we were very impressed with their determination and quick-thinking in getting their robots under the 12 inch ceiling, so that the refs could allow them to launch from base.

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