New Pieces Found in SUPERPOWERED Field Kit

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FIRST LEGO League SUPERPOWERED launched on August 2, along with the Mission Model Building Instructions! When building our models for the SUPERPOWERED field kit, our team found some neat relatively new LEGO Technic pieces that will be a great resource for using in your LEGO Technic builds, whether for FLL robots or for your own projects! Check them out, learn part numbers, and find out how to purchase more of these exciting pieces.

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Transitioning from FLL to FTC: Forming a Team

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Transitioning from FIRST LEGO League Challenge to FIRST Tech Challenge may seem rather frightening. It is normal to be scared of something new, but FIRST Tech Challenge brings its own awesome opportunities. Last year our team moved from FIRST LEGO League to FIRST Tech Challenge. It may seem like a big jump, but the programs are remarkably similar!

This article discusses the changes and similarities between FLL and FTC in the team structure and formation. We will post other articles outlining other differences, such as the robot game, the actual robot, competition structure, judging, awards, and advancement. Stay tuned!

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SUPERPOWERED Preseason Materials

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The 2022-2023 FIRST LEGO League Challenge season will launch on August 2, 2022. If your team is so excited that you just can’t wait to start thinking of the possibilities, this summer is a great time to start brainstorming with your team what next season might entail.

We created resources for teams as they begin investigating the new Robot Game and Innovation Project topic. The resources guide the exploration of the year’s topic and guessing the possible challenges. Explore ideas with your team! Learn something new!

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Innovation Project: Create and Iterate Your Prototype

We created a video on how how to create and iterate your FIRST LEGO League team’s Innovation Project as you progress through the season by using one of our own past Innovation Projects as an example. We will talk about how we went from just a drawing of our solution idea, to a proof-of-concept prototype, to a full-sized functional model. We thank Droids Robotics and the Share & Learn Community for featuring our video as part of their FIRST LEGO League Challenge Rookie Team Webinar series.

Robot Game: Field Kit Tips

We created a video talking about the CARGO CONNECT robot game field kit with some building tips (if your team has not started building it yet), along with some build aspects to check for on every mission model to prevent your team from running into issues with incorrectly built mission models. Some of these are checks that your team may need to do all season long. In order to program your robot to be successful, your team needs to start with an error-free robot game field, and this video will help you achieve that!

More CARGO CONNECT resources at CARGO CONNECT™ Resources

Innovation Project: Building Problem Solvers

We created a video on the Innovation Project and how it can help build your team into problem solvers. We will walk teams through what is involved in the Innovation Project from identifying a problem, designing a solution, creating a prototype, sharing and iterating your solution, and communicating your work with others.

More CARGO CONNECT resources at CARGO CONNECT™ Resources

How to Run EV3 Lab/EV3-G on an Up-to-Date Computer (even Macs)

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Even though SPIKE Prime and the Mindstorms Robot Inventor Kit are here and are awesome tools, the EV3 is still here to stay for a lot of schools, teams, and home users. The current EV3 Classroom from LEGO Education has Scratch-based programming (similar to the SPIKE Prime and Mindstorms Robot Inventor Kit). However, many people have grown to love the older LabVIEW-based block language currently known as EV3 Lab/EV3-G. If you get a new Windows computer, you have to search a bit for the EV3 Lab download, but it will still run on even Windows 10. We will show you how below. However, do you have an updated Mac computer and are sad that you can no longer run the older EV3 programming language EV3 Lab/EV3-G on it? If your Mac computer is updated to 10.15 (Catalina) or higher, the old EV3 Lab software cannot run. However, we have figured out a way around this, so that you can have the best of both worlds – an up-to-date Mac and EV3 Lab successfully running.

Today, we are going to walk you through the steps we used to run EV3 Lab/EV3-G on current Windows and Mac computers. Please note that EV3 Lab will no longer be updated by LEGO Education, but it still has a place in many homes and schools.

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Core Values Teamwork Challenges

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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!).

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