Sunday, March 6, 2011

State Tournament

Congratulations Supernova for a great job at the State tournament. They were the only team called back for both Technical and Project, and were honored with the 1st Place Ambassador Award and 2nd Place Robot Design Award.

We're very proud of the team. They're currently entered in the FLL Global Innovation Award contest and are working on their provisional patent application. It's a fantastic idea and they've put in a lot of creative energy.

Vote for their idea at

http://fllinnovationaward.firstlegoleague.org/teams/supernova/submission/automated-club-foot-orthotic





Thursday, January 6, 2011

Batavia Regional


I couldn't let a whole year go by without a new post.

Our Batavia Regional, less than 3 weeks ago went very well. Supernova earned the project award, their first ever, and an invitation to state. They were selected to present their project to the entire audience and did a really nice job. I was exceptionally proud of their teamwork interview. Gracious professionalism all the way.

Although they were 5th out of 15 teams, their robot score was well below what they had hoped for. Many teams were lamenting the fact that nothing worked the same at tournament as it did back on their practice tables. We brought a 370 pt solution and our best was 195. Still, it's not all about the robots. They really bit off a lot this year, using an entirely different programming language. So, although their performance was not as high as they would like, they have grown and learned a tremendous amount getting to this point. They have basically had to port all of the software work they had developed the previous few years, which involved writing lower-level functions to regain some of the functionality that was built in with the previous language.

Congratulations Supernova