One of the FLL teams whose students go to our school district, the Brick Masters, had a tournament coming up soon. In order to help them prepare for their tournament, we conducted a mock tournament judging session with them.
At this mock judging session, we asked them questions pertaining to all sections of judging: robot design, project, and core values. During the robot design part of the session, we reminded them that the judges would always ask about sensors and their trial and error designs. To help them prepare for the project session, we watched their project skit, which marketed a solution for providing clean drinking water to rural areas in Africa. For the core values activity, we split the team up into two groups: one that had a fully built LEGO model, and the other had a disassembled version of that same LEGO model. The group with the assembled LEGO model gave instructions to the other group on how to build that LEGO model. In addition to the team members learning about the importance of being specific in communication, they had a lot of fun while doing this activity.
At the end of the session, the team learned that they need to speak loudly, slowly, and clearly during their project presentation and they figured out an orderly way to go through each mission for the robot design presentation. Through the core values activity that we administered, we found out that the team works quite well together.