The First Look at FIRST Lego League

    I have been involved with FIRST robotics for five years now. My time has been mostly spent with the high school level of play. This year as I have worked to try and bring the FIRST community center to West Michigan and we will be officially opening in January 2016. I have also been involved with other people with the same passion for this stuff. There is one gentleman that is working to start up more elementary level programs. I would love to have William involved on a team that is at his level. I talked to the principal at his school and it sounds like we will be starting at least one team there next year that is at William's age level. The hope would be to have a robotics teams at every level. I would love to see that happen so William would have that experience as he moves through school.

    William and I stopped by a school that has a the Lego league program running to see what it looks like. The school we visited was getting ready for a competition this weekend. We got to see the field, the different components and everything that makes up the game. William was very excited about what he saw. I was very glad to see him get so excited. Now we just have to figure out how to start this team at his school. The principal told me that he sent out an email about starting a team and he got so many responses that he is not sure what to do. He told me that he also had many parents offer to help and be mentors. That is awesome news. He is waiting to get final numbers so we can decide how many teams we need and how much this will cost. I am excited to get to finally get to have William on a team that he is a real participant in. 

    We have been going to the middle school level robotics the last few weeks. They have asked for help with programming their robot. William gets to help a little bit on this robot. He is still a little young for this level and the students are much older than him. I am glad that they let him get involved. Yesterday he helped put tape on the floor where the field would be so that we can start working on the robot controls. We got the robot moving and controlling yesterday and we got the autonomous part working with a very simple program. There are only three more work days left until the first competition.

Life is good when you are building robots, : )

Your Loving Dad