We will be having an informational meeting for parents after school on Wednesday, April 29th, in the Vinal computer room to review the Robotics and Lego League Programs at Vinal. If your child is interested in either of these programs for next year or future years, please try to attend. Coming to the meeting does not commit you to anything. Below, we have provided some links to Lego, an NXT Tutorial, and Lego League. It would be very helpful if you could take a few minutes to look at these before coming to the meeting.



If you have any questions, please contact Susannah at 781-659-2886 or swurgler@dunquin.net.

We hope to see you on the 29th.



Susannah Murphy and Cheryl Rastelli



Some General Information about Robotics and Lego League



Information about the Lego NXT Mindstorms Robots can be found on the Lego website at http://www.lego.com. You can find them through the “Products” link or search for “Mindstorms”. There is an on-line, child-oriented, NXT programming tutorial (http://www.ortop.org/NXT_Tutorial/html/essentials.html) that is very helpful in guiding the user through programming the NXT. The tutorial is organized into segments so that you can view it for a few minutes or for as long as you like. Start with the tab labeled “Essentials”. NXT programming is a cut-and-paste system of pre-designed segments. You DO NOT have to learn a programming language.



The First Lego League home page is

http://www.usfirst.org/firstlegoleague/community/homepage.html. Click on the FLL or JrFLL, and then “Overview” to access a general description of the program.



Lego League is organized into two age groups:

In First Lego League (9-14 year olds) teams complete a Research Project and compete in a timed Robot Game in competitions. Teams may have up to 10 members. The Robot Game consists of three, 2.5-minute rounds in which the robot is required to complete defined tasks. In each robot round, only 2 team members are allowed to operate the robot. Since there are 3 rounds, 6 team members have a chance to operate the robot at a tournament. If your team has more than 6 members, then some kids will only be spectators for this part of the tournament.



Junior Lego League (6-9 year olds) consists of the Poster and the Model. Teams may have up to 10 members. Junior Lego League tournaments are similar to science fairs and there is not a robot competition against other teams. Teams build a Lego Model related to their research project.