Congratulations to the Legonauts, our First Place Champion’s Award winning team and all 48 of the competing teams – we had an amazing day! All award winners and performance scores are now posted on the www.norcalfll.org site.

Here is our recap of the 2009 Smart Move Northern California FLL Championship tournament held at Newark Memorial HS on Saturday January 16th.   We welcome feedback and please post video, pictures and your own thoughts on the ning site!

Thank you 2009 Northern California FLL Sponsors

 

 

This is the 10th year of the Northern California Championship and the 6th 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.  We also welcome BAE as a sponsor for Northern California FLL tournaments.  Thank you also to the Girl Scouts of Northern California and Vestas for their support.

 

A big thank you goes to everyone that volunteered and participated – yesterday and throughout this tournament season!  With 14 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.    

 

We have many outstanding volunteers including more than 8 people that volunteered for more than 5 tournaments this year – including at least 3 that volunteered at least 7 tournaments (and we are not counting ourselves)!  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.

We had 48 teams registered with all teams participating. The tournament was structured so that the day had 5 “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) from 3 teams and one team put up two 400s – Los Altos Geek Squad.  Wow!  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 “Smart Move” 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 instead of an alliance round, we pioneered a “Kids Choice Awards”.   We would like your input on how 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.  One serious thing that we will fix is how the votes are tallied.  We had anticipated it taking only a couple of hours but instead it took significantly painfully longer which made the award ceremony start late.   We have some ideas (local web server and “online” voting) but welcome your ideas and even better, your help in improving this.

Tiffany Strickland with the Girls Scouts of Northern California 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  – even more than last year.  Glenn Trewitt from Google made all of the name badges.   Thank you!

We handed out trophies and the closing ceremony was completed at 6:20pm (we think) – ahead of the published schedule time of 6:30pm but later than the 6pm time that we “planned” for.

Additional activities going in throughout the day: we had a FTC scrimmage, a networked server for viewing robot game scores throughout the event center and a remote feed to the cafeteria of the robot game and robot game scores.    We tried out a new method of having the teams’ project presentations available via kiosk stations 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.  

 And we had the “Lego Yuh Mind” FLL team stop by as FLL International guests from Jamaica and they were able to do a few exhibition rounds over the day.  Thank you to the Nor Cal community for welcoming them.

We had a design company (Ad Special Ts from Vacaville) offer a custom championship shirt. We had a separate medallion / team photo setup area in the Cougar commons and roving photographers and videographer.

 

In spite of staying up late building up the overall team slide show, we totally spaced about it and didn’t get the slideshow copied to the right computer to be displayed over the breaks – We will post it.  Also, due to so many late entries and some complications with schedules, we decided there was not enough time to properly evaluate all of the websites.  So, we decided to wait to announce the Website award – we will do so in the next few weeks – stay tuned.

 

An incredibly big thank you to Varsha Patel who coordinated the over 200 volunteers for setup, event day and clean up.

 

We were able to do some setup on Friday afternoon – thanks to Suds Jain for helping load up the truck and then came to help at 3pm with setting up the pits along with the Piedmont Hills High School Key Club.  Pit setup took only about 90 minutes.  All other setup was done on Saturday morning – thank you to the force of people that came to the school bright and early and eager to help – Amazing and Thank you!  In particular, thank you to Steve Wilson, Tim McKay and Andrew Hospodor and many others that had no connections to any of the teams competing but answered the call for help to be there at 6am.  Thank you!  We had the use of the Event Center, Cougar Commons (cafeteria), library, and 12 classrooms in 300 and 700 wings – it was the 3rd time that we used this campus and we hope it won’t be our last.

 

We took a “step” backward this year with the team check-in process.  It was supposed to be a “no line” situation but we gave wrong input to the wonderfully patient, team parent volunteers that had signed up for this task.  We will fix this to have better preparation for it, but we plan to do something similar next year.  Also looks like some coaches did not read the bottom of the check-in form to add a mailing address for the judges feedback forms to be mailed to them.

We thank the FIRST Robotics teams that sent help our way during their own busy “build” season – in particular, the rookie Warriorbots, FRC team #3429 that came with their tshirt shooter and the Insomniacs, FRC team #2489 that managed the lunch pizza orders and a cool “green screen” photo shoot that overlaid teams with a backdrop of this year’s challenge field mat.   

Thank you to Jon Perkins for being our head referee and Tiffany Strickland for being our head judge along with Scott Adamson, Albert Bodenhamer and Maggie Best for leading the discussions for their respective judged areas to get the 4 panels of judges to generate their top teams. 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 stepping up and handling two roles over the day including managing the food and refreshments area through lunch rush and then being the floor manager in the afternoon.   In addition, thank you to Glenn Trewitt as our morning floor manager, Carey Rasmus as scorekeeper, Ken Mitchell as queue manager, Karl LeVezu as DJ, Alan LeVezu as sound (and who brought his sound system down from Placer County), Peter Schwarz and Matt Davis for doing all of the video capture and DB Mishra as timekeeper.  A big thank you for the positive atmosphere of the day goes to Ken Leung, Barry Hayes, Glenn Inn, Gio Minelli, and Jai Musunuri for being our wonderful emcees and game announcers.

Thank you to Glenn Trewitt for the 4 FLL challenge tables used in the judging rooms,  and to the people who brought pit practice tables for teams to use, especially Michael Schmidt, who brought two tables up from San Jose.   

We want to thank all of our 17 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 7:05pm – a new record time – shaving 10 minutes off of last year’s record. 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 in early March. Let us know if you can provide a location and/or are interested in attending.  We would like to start monthly planning sessions for next year FLL events but we need a host site for these meetings.

Thanks again to everyone having a positive outlook and attitude. We look forward to May 3rd when registration opens for BODY FORWARD, the 2010 Challenge theme about Biomedical Engineering! Challenge Kickoff is September 3rd (227 days from 1/18).

Cheers,

Jill Wilker & Mark Edelman
Northern California FLL Partner
Playing At Learning, a 501(c)(3) public charity