Yesterday we competed at a local middle school against 15 other FLL teams and we actually won! I was losing hope of winning anything since we didn't get anything for the project or robot design. I thought we were pretty strong in those areas. It turned out in the end we wound up with the plaque for the overall Scrimmage Champions. It doesn't advance us to anything at the state level or do anything really special since this was just a practice session, but we were proud to get the award.
It's only about half way through the season and no team is really ready to compete, but we learned so much of what we needed to do from all the wonderful volunteer judges who shared with us honestly what we did well and what we could improve upon. We can only get better from here.
I LOVE what FLL teaches the kids. It's not really about the robots. The scrimmage helped the kids learn about working under pressure. They had to interact with adults who had very pointed questions about their research, teamwork and robot building design and held them accountable. Best of all, they got a chance to experience failure & disappointment and how to pick themselves up from that and continue the competition. I was so proud to be part of a team of kids who encouraged one another. One kid was really discouraged about one of the robot runs and another sat down with him and encouraged him about the whole situation. Our team definitely came together as a unit yesterday and so now I hope they will take these lessons learned and grow from it. It's not about Championships or robots or LEGOs. I'll speak to that in my next post.
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