FLL Challenge pre-reg open for the 2024-2025 SUBMERGED season!

The Anacortes Robotics Booster Club is now collecting information to help form FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Challenge robotics teams for the 2024-2025 school year.  Students in grades 4 through 8 are eligible to participate.  Forming teams requires finding adult volunteers to coach, and a location for each team to meet twice a week for 2 to 2 1/2 hours per meeting.  Teams start meeting as soon as they can be formed in order to prepare for their first tournament in December.  Teams that advance beyond their first tournament will continue to meet in January and possibly beyond.  Pre-register your student to help form an ARBC-sponsored team at: https://anacortesrobotics.org/programs/fll-challenge/

This year’s SUBMERGED challenge is to dive into a problem faced by people who explore the oceans, whether in the sunlight, twilight, or abyssal zones.  Anacortes’ location, geography, and community should really aid our students in this challenge!  This season’s details were released by FIRST on August 6, and students who are eager to start the season can and should use the Internet to access those details and begin their research and planning: https://www.firstinspires.org/resource-library/fll/challenge/challenge-and-resources

FLL Challenge is a team-based creative engineering and innovation competition.  Students will collectively, as a team, explore the challenges for the season, develop and improve solutions through testing and iteration, then deliver their results in one or more tournaments.  All teams are evaluated at day-long tournaments in four equally-weighted areas:

  • Core Values
    • The manner in which the team approaches the challenges, engineers and innovates solutions, improves through iteration, and impacts the team’s community and beyond
  • Innovation Project
    • The ability of the team to explore/research a problem domain, identify interesting problems, and develop an innovative solution to one of those problems
  • Robot Design
    • The methods the team uses to create and program a LEGO robot that autonomously plays the Robot Game by manipulating themed LEGO mission models on a 4’ x 8’ playing field
  • Robot Performance
    • How many points the team can score using their robot in during 2 minute 30 second Robot Game matches


Meeting locations/times:

  • Anacortes Middle School’s Robotics Club will meet at AMS twice weekly for 2 1/2 hours per meeting for students in grades 6 through 8.  Last year’s Tuesday/Thursday schedule is probable but not guaranteed, final details will be worked out among participating coaches, students, and parents.
  • The Anacortes elementary schools may only be able to provide meeting space after 5 pm.  I will help parents of students in 4th and 5th grades who wish to meet at an elementary school work out details with their school.
  • Teams can meet at any location that the team parents agree upon, including a coach’s home, a community location such as the Anacortes Boys and Girls Club, or at a local business/commercial space that agrees to host the team.  However, the parents of the students on the team are responsible for making all arrangements for locations such as these.