Lego League Competition

Kade participated in a group called FIRST Lego League.  

For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST )

(In September each year, a new challenge is announced that focuses on a different real-world topic related to the sciences.  Each challenge within the competition then revolves around that theme. The robotics part of the competition revolves around designing and programming Lego Robots to complete tasks. The students work out solutions to the various problems they are given and then meet for regional tournaments to share their knowledge, compare ideas, and display their robots.)

Anyway--it's awesome and he loved it.  It was a new team and no one had done it before and Kade learned a lot from it.  They would get together once a week and  basically talk about core values (Kade was responsible for leading the discussion on “We gain more from what we learn then what we win”) design and discuss how to make their robot work and practice building different prototypes for a robot to rescue things in a natural disaster.  They worked specifically on Nature’s Fury: Earthquakes: Search and Rescue: Machines and Equipment.  

Kade's coach was so cool too.  The kids would have programing ideas and he'd just let them take his laptop and program it to do whatever.  

They had 3 different rounds to make their robots take care of recovery from a natural disaster.  Release helicopters with different attachments they could think up of, or chop down tree's or move an ambulance or other vehicles to a certain destination (which was the part Kade did....unfortunately...for some reason I have no idea about, the robot started going super duper slow on Kade's turn. It was so sad to see the whole team rally around and watch...it...sputter...and barely move.  Here's a little video of what it was like.