The University of Southern Indiana’s Southwest Indiana STEM (SwiSTEM) Resource Center will host the first FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Southwest Indiana Qualifying Tournament for grades four to eight from 1 to 6 p.m. Saturday, November 19, in University Center East at USI. Thirteen teams of children age 9 to 14 from throughout southern Indiana will compete.
FIRST LEGO League is a robotics program designed to get children excited about science and technology and teach them valuable employment and life skills. Teams, composed of up to 10 children with at least one adult coach, can also be associated with a pre-existing club or organization, homeschooled, or just be a group of friends.
Teams program an autonomous robot using the LEGO Mindstorms robot set to score points on a thematic playing surface (rather than a three-dimensional obstacle course) and create an innovative solution to a problem as part of their research project. Check out the FLL Youtube page to view teams in action.
A qualifying tournament for FLL has never been held in southwest Indiana.
Although the student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) will play an important role in this competition, it is not to be confused with the USI Robotics Competition, which has been sponsored by the student chapter of the ASME at USI since 2008. That competition, which also utilizes LEGO Mindstorms robots, is held in the spring.
For more information contact Allison Grabert, SwiSTEM Center interim director, at afgrabert@usi.edu or 812/228-5019.
