Patumahoe FLL

Patumahoe First Lego League

New Zealand is running a pilot year for the First Lego League http://www.kiwifirst.org/ and we have entered our team (of 10 to 13 year olds) in the competition.  

The competition uses the Lego Mindstorms NXT sets.  Each team uses a programmable module to activate the robot your team has designed.  This robot has to perform a series of tasks to accumulate as  many points it can within two and a half minutes. 

There are four areas of scoring – each 25% of your total:

• Team Presentation a 5 minute presentation on this year’s challenge,                                   
• Task completion as described above,
• Team contribution how well the team work together
• Elegance of design/program the design of the program/robot that is used.

The challenge will be officially issued on the 3rd of September 2009.  The theme this year is Smart Moves.

 The tournament will be held at Strathallen 0n December 12th 2009.

This tournament has been running since 1998 in the United States http://www.usfirst.org/, and for the past four years in Australia http://www.primefll.com.au/.

For this pilot year the number of registrations has been limited to 26 teams, but the competition is expected to expand each year as interest grows.

Between tournaments we will be running a Lego Robotics club open to all interested children between the ages of 8 and 15 years of age.  For information please contact patumahoefll@windowslive.com