AIS Robotics Team

On 22 November, AIS competed with a team of 9 students, aged between 10-14 in the “First Lego League” competition at the UCLL campus. This year’s theme was hydrodynamics. Our engineers, programmers and designers competed in four rounds: EV3 robot design, robot game, teamwork and project presentation. The team won the project round for the “Hydroelectric urinal” prototype they designed to solve a world water problem. Read the story of their journey below, written by Jake (Grade 7). 

Two months ago, we (Nikhil, Harshall, Aman, Veer, Parshva, Zsombor, Jadon, Evan and Jake) entered the Fll Hydrodynamics Ev3 Competition by Lego Mindstorms. We met every Wednesday after school to work on the assignments we were given. Then, on Wednesday, 22 November, we went to the competition. Let’s tell you about our journey there.

During the first practice, we went over some team rules and split into groups. There was the engineering team which built the prototype for our design, the leadership team which did research on the competition, and the programming team which built and programmed the robot.

At the beginning of the season, we started building robots but it went slowly. We were told to build robots over the weekend but most of us didn’t, which then took up another lesson. Then, we had one group building attachments to add to the robot for the different missions. Some of the following weeks, the soccer boys had to miss a few sessions for games and NECIS, so the others kept working.

After they got back, we had one more week left before the competition. We had to come in at lunches, after school, and the weekend. We probably got the most done in this last week. At the weekend we got some more programmes done and worked on the presentation. Jake’s mom also came during the weekend and on Monday and Tuesday. Jake and his mom stayed late with Mr. Growett to work on programming towards the end. We went from being able to do 2 missions to 7.

On the day of the competition we had to go to Leuven. When we got there, we went to the room that we would be staying in during the competition, and set up our mat and robot. After 45 minutes, we went straight to the opening ceremony. We learned about how the day would work and the schedule.

10 minutes after that we had the presentation of our Engineering Design. We did an excellent presentation with the great slides made by the engineering team. They had come up with the invention we call the hydroelectric urinal. It is about creating electricity from bodily waste. You pee into the turbine which rotates and produces energy. The judge really liked the idea, especially the part about the app to compete with it.

Next we had the robot presentation where we had to talk about the making of our robot and our programmes. He also gave us a tricky question that we all had to answer. We did quite well in that one too. After that, we had the teambuilding exercise. We did alright in that but we kept on falling off the mat that we had to turn over while standing on it. It was really fun though.

After that, we had a little time to prepare for the robot games to go over the programmes. Some of them worked but some didn’t because of human error under the rush of the game. We did well though, scoring 80, 90 and 75 points. At the end, we went to the trophy ceremony where we got the trophy for the best design idea. If we had more time, we would probably work more on the other three areas and strengthen our programmes. Everyone had a fun time this season.

Team Robotics