FIRST LEGO League State Competition Judging

State Championship:
Sun, Feb 22, 2009
Florida Institute of Technology

  8:30am - 5:00pm 

 

The Society of Women Engineers Space Coast Section is coordinating the judging for the Florida state competition for FLL and the East Regional at Rockledge High School.  Judges are needed in four areas:

If you want to volunteer for a position not related to judging, please register at www.flrobotics.org
               

Signup to be a Judge or other judging volunteer 

We also need a Judge Facilitator for each area who is responsible for keeping the judges on schedule, handling any problems that occur and getting a consensus for team ranking at the conclusion.

Background information:

FLL is a competition for teams of up to 10 students ages 9-14 years old.  The competition consists of table matches (where their robot runs) and judging on the design and construction of the robot and software as well as how effective they operate as a team.  In addition, they are required to conduct research on a topic related to the theme designated for the year and are judged on a presentation of their research.  They receive a new "challenge" each year consisting of a set of missions to be accomplished on a 4' x 8' table with a mat a field set up to simulate some scenario.  The robot match is 2 1/2 minutes long.  Each team runs their robot three times.  

Robots are constructed from LEGO Robotics kits and are programmed using either the LEGO Mindstorms software or Robolab software which is based on Labview.  Both software programs are graphic and have fairly simple constructs.  The teams bring their robot and either a printout of their programs or a laptop for viewing the programs to the judging area.  Hardware judges have the teams demonstrate how their robot accomplishes the mission objectives and talk with the team members about how their robot is designed, why they made specific design decisions, etc.  Software judges have the teams walk through their software and have them talk about the design and how effective their software is.  

For the Research Presentation judging, the teams have 1 minute to setup any props they have, 5 minutes to present followed by questions from the judges on the research project.  For Teamwork judging, this year we are providing materials and asking the teams to accomplish a task (similar to a creative problem solving exercise) so the judges can observe how effective the team in in a real time setting.  The judges will also have a Q&A period to ask questions about how the team operates.

Judges are provided with a set of rubrics (a qualities matrix defining fair, good, etc in a variety of areas) and a set of sample questions to ask students.  We will set up a training telecon prior to each of the competitions and can schedule face to face sessions for judges on request.

The Theme for this year's competition is Climate Connections.  
       Description of the robot mission
       Research Project Description

Want to view a video of the robot missions?  Check out This You Tube video for a 10 minute video review of all the missions.

Questions?  Contact Judy Kersey at judy.kersey@swe.org