Congratulations to all of the teams for a great day! All award winners and performance scores are posted on the www.norcalfll.org site.
Here is our recap of the 2010 Body Forward Northern California FLL Championship tournament and overall season. We welcome feedback and please post video, pictures and your own thoughts on the community site!
Thank you 2010
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The 2010 Body Forward season started off in NorCal with 2 kickoffs – one held at Google HQ in Mt View for ~400 team members and coaches and one at Intel Folsom for ~300.
We had 384 Northern California FLL registered teams, 335 teams that competed at a qualifier, 108 teams at the 3 regionals and 48 teams compete at the Championship.
This season, we had all tournament weekends published early – all first level events would be only on 2 weekends in November and regionals would only be on 2 weekends in December. We had significantly fewer issues this year with tournament registration both for qualifiers and regionals. We ended up with all 3 regionals over just the first weekend in December – which helped solve of the major regional registration issue from last year and perhaps most importantly, we pre-announced which qualifiers will advance to which regional. However, on the negative, it was much harder on all of our volunteers- and we need to figure out a “win-win” between what is better for teams (tight scheduling of tournaments) and what is better for our volunteer base (spread out tournament dates and flexilbility to move dates to accommodate site conflicts). One way that you can help with this is to help us dramatically grow our volunteer base! In general, let us know how we can further refine the tournament process overall.
This is the 11th year of the Northern California Championship and the 7th year that Playing At Learning has been the FIRST LEGO League operational partner. We are pleased that Google has returned as a major sponsor of the Championship tournament.
A big thank you goes to everyone that volunteered and participated – yesterday and throughout this tournament season! With 22 qualifiers, 3 regionals and the championship, we appreciate the sheer number of volunteers (and the number that volunteer for multiple events) and the amazing accomplishments of the teams and wonderful support that they had from their coaches, mentors, parents and families.
We have many outstanding volunteers including many people that volunteer for many tournaments every year! We need to figure out how to better thank our volunteers for that incredible effort on behalf of our community and on behalf of our youth.
The Championship tournament was structured so that the day had 5 “activity slices”. In the first four slices, teams had 3 robot rounds and their judging. All teams then had a fourth and final robot round while the judges started deliberating.
The high score of the day was 400 (the maximum points possible)! Good job, Claws! For the judging track, we had 4 judging panels. Each team was judged in 3 areas: robot design (which included programming as well as mechanical design), teamwork and the “Body Foward” project. We allocated 12 minutes with the judges and 8 minutes for the judges to discuss and evaluate the team based on the rubrics and write notes. Additionally, we had roving judges wandering around watching the team interactions. Again, our amazing crew of judges completed their deliberations with no callbacks.
This year (as we did last year), we held a “Kids Choice Awards”. We would like your input on how to continue to improve this aspect as we believe that it helps achieve the goal of encouraging teams to get to know each other and “scout” the strengths of the other teams – an important skill as the team members move on in FIRST. We did move to electronic voting – let us know how that worked for your team!.
Craig Eldershow from PARC printed all of the commemorative program books. We will post the PDF file of the program if you did not receive one, as they were very popular.
We handed out trophies and the closing ceremony was completed just before 6pm- ahead of the published schedule time of 6:30pm and ahead of the 6:20pm completion in 2009.
Additional activities going in throughout the day: we had a FTC demo. We again tried out having the teams’ project presentations available for viewing in the cafeteria and thank you to the teams that sent in a copy of their presentations for this purpose. As we have mentioned quite a few times in the past, we are always looking for how to get more visibility on the project presentations without impacting the teams’ judging interviews. We think this is a “bust” – I didn’t hear of anyone actually watching any of the videos. What can we do about this?
An incredibly big thank you to Varsha Patel who coordinated the many volunteers for setup, event day and clean up including the Independence High School’s Interact Club.
We were able to do almost all setup on Friday afternoon – though we didn’t know this until Thursday (and then were told that we would not have access to the main gym floor until after 6pm) We appreciate being able to set up earlier than expected but would have appreciated being able to recruit more help. We had the use of the Event Center, Cougar Commons (cafeteria), library, one room in the Event Center plus 12 classrooms in 300 and 700 wings – it was the 4th time that we used this campus and we hope it won’t be our last.
We continue to have issues with coaches that want to wait in a line for the team check-in process – more work is needed here.
We thank the FIRST Robotics teams that sent help our way during their own busy “build” season and FTC team 4328 for managing the food concessions and FTC team 2848 for setting up the FTC demo and helping with setup. Your support of FLL is greatly appreciated!
Thank you to Jon Perkins for being our head referee and Tiffany Strickland for being our head judge. A huge thank you to all of the judges and referees that helped make the day a success for the teams.
Also thank you to Pat Liu for being our conceirge premiere, handling most anything and everything. In addition, thank you to Glenn Trewitt as our floor manager, Anthony Voo as scorekeeper, Peter Schwarz and Flick for doing all of the video capture A big thank you for the positive atmosphere of the day goes to Jai Musunuri and Scot Brees for being our wonderful emcees and game announcers.
Thank you to the teams who brought judging tables and pit practice tables for teams to use.
We want to thank all of our qualifying and regional tournament organizers and their hosts in providing tournaments to this year’s Northern California FLL teams.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
We finished cleanup on Saturday close to 7pm. Thank you to everyone that helped tear down the pits, the competition floors, the judging rooms and load the truck.
If you have heard Dean Kamen (founder of FIRST) speak, you know that he truly believes that society gets what it celebrates – and hopefully everyone felt that the kids’ contributions and achievements were celebrated this season. We strongly believe that programs like FLL have an amazing impact on our youth.
We love to hear and see the impacts that FLL has had on the kids. If you post video on YouTube, or blog or post photos or get any media coverage, please let us know about it. One downside of running the event is that Mark nor I don’t get much time to “take in” the day. 🙁 So, please share.
We invite your feedback on all aspects of this year’s FLL season including all tournaments – what worked well, what didn’t, what we should keep, what we should change. We would like to schedule a season debrief session sometime soon. Let us know if you can provide a location and/or are interested in attending. More importantly, we are expecting to have 450 NorCal teams next year and need everyone to start looking at potential tournament host sites – we expect to need 28 or more qualifiers! We would like to start monthly planning sessions for next year FLL events.
Thanks again to everyone having a positive outlook and attitude. We look forward to May 2nd when registration opens for FOOD FACTOR, the 2011 Challenge theme about Food Safety! Challenge Kickoff is September 2nd, 2011 (215 days from today, 1/30).
Cheers,
Jill Wilker & Mark Edelman
Northern California FLL Partner
Playing At Learning, a 501(c)(3) public charity