The Tune Up Event

Coach Vicky had to be away for the FLL Tune Up event this year, as she was participating in her best friend's wedding.  However the  Conyngham Code Crackers did an amazing job! What a great event, and good way to warm up for the Reading Penn State Event this January.

Thanks to Uncle Jamie, Coach Keith, Coach Sue, and everyone else who helped the kiddos succeed.  

God Save the Bees!

One of the best things about FLL, is that it asks you help out the community in a special way with the project portion. This year Animal Allies asked us to pick an animal, and identify a problem we could solve with the way humans interact with the animal. As a group we decided to research the mason bee, after a few weeks of studying other animals.

Once we picked the bee, we knew we needed to come up with a solution to help aid them in our own community. We know that our families and neighbors care about their gardens, and keep well manicured lawns. The problem is that we often kill the food supply and homes of the mason bee! So we decided to build special Bee Sanctuaries to help aid our friends.  We also developed special seed bombs.

With aid from Coach Sue, she taught us how to mold and create seed bombs. Our seed bombs are pretty special. They are especially designed to help our local mason bee.  They use special manure,  clay, and seeds for our friends. Ethan specially molded and help with this project.

 

Mr. Mazzie, helped us with our Bee Houses. Noah came up a bee house design, and logo for on top. We each took turns drilling all the holes in the houses.  His lawn sign is spot on!

Finally we have been working on our presentation. Mrs. Mazzie helped us come up with our beautiful costumes. Isn't Sophie just the sweetest flower? Jake will get to play this role too. We think Pink is also his color!

 
 We created some other props, with the help of Coach Sue.  We think Nick makes the perfect little mason bee, and Sammy and Billy are strong narrators. We can't wait to share with you our skit.

We Fixed it!

In FLL there is always room for redesign! We saw that our robot needed that when she wasn't easily going over some of the game board. The problem was that the ball socket was getting hooked on the gate piece, as Myrtle plowed over it. So we took our design back to the drawing board.
 
We created a special back end design for Myrtle and it seems to allow her to easily travel over the gate.  We talked with mentor from Penn FLL, who gave us the idea that we needed to support the ball socket with braces.  (Thanks so much coach Jim!)

Jake, Sophie, and Sammy came up with a quick design. Sure enough it was all we needed.   In the future, we might come up with a smoother design that incorporates other wheels. We just are running on limited lego parts and supplies.   All in good time.  For now, we are happy to improvise with what we got.

We love it when a plan comes together!