The three Garrett County FIRST LEGO teams all brought home trophies from the Pittsburgh Regional competition this weekend.

The Northern Middle School team won First Place in Robot Performance with a top score of 386 out of 400.

The Southern Middle School team won Third Place in Robot performance with a top score of 340 out of 400.
The team also won Fourth place in the Research Project.

The Accident Elementary School Team Won Third Place in Teamwork.

Sure do.

As an experiment, I got together with Sam (one of the Southern Middle School FLL kids), and Ian (one of his buddies) and we tried putting together a small underwater ROV (remotely operated vehicle).

Check out the Photo gallery to see what we made.

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Woo Hoo.

I submitted our Tax Exempt application on July 2nd, and I was astounded to receive an approval back on August 24th. I'm hoping that the quick turn-around was due to the completness and accuracy of the application.

I have form-a-fobia, which means that I break out in a rash whenever I need to start filling in forms, and tax Form 1023 was no exception.

Anyway, I can now start considering various ways to raise funds for more robotic activities.

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Last night we showed off the GEARS building and demonstrated the FRC and FLL robots to a group of area business leaders.

The kids did great, and all the Dev. Corp. members seemed to have a good time.

It's neat being able to show off the robots and get the community excited about what we do at GEARS and in the schools.

Get online and watch the Webcast of the PA Robotics Challenge.

Here's the link to the webcast....

www.shinraikon.com/PARCX.htm

Play starts at 9:00am

On tuesday we had the first of our series of five 4-H robotics meetings. The kids formed teams of 2 and built their "Tank-Bot" out of LEGO and Mindstorms robotic parts.

Then the kids went outside and talked about all the different types of robots we see around us these days.

Then we went upstairs and I gave some pointers about LEGO programming. Wouldn't you know it, that pesky MAC gave me trouble. That will teach me to leave my IBM at home :)

WOW, the competiton was tough this year at the FLL.

Winning a perfect score of 400 wasn't enough to win even 3rd place on the table. The team that got two perfect scores came second, and the 1st place team got THREE perfect scores....

We actually got our top individual score on practice day... 395, but the best we could get today (during competition) was about 356.....

Nevertheless when we got to play our alliance game, our alliance scored the second highest point score (missing only two points) so we won a 2nd place trophy. For this match we teamed up with three other teams to play another alliance of 4 teams. It was very tricky figuring out which missions each team would do and in what order...