Updated Jan 17, 2010 :   Northern California State Tournament Update

WOW!! This was an exciting weekend at NorCalFLL! The robots at this tournament were really impressive and a lot of teams seem to benefit from the extra regional tournament level this year. Mission strategies and attachments for some of these bots were very advanced and polished. I can imagine the judging sessions were pretty impressive as well. The Norcal state tournaments have always been exciting, but this smaller tournament with 48 high level teams was more fun to watch and a little less hectic than the 64 team events of prior years. I heard that judging and everything went much smoother this year. I felt in general that teams and event volunteers looked like they were focused, organized, and having a lot of fun.

The competition in robot performance this year was very close with the top 20 teams posting in excess of 330 points. The early robot performance leader was Antipodes , a strong team of 3 middle school girls from Pacifica. Their bot was rock solid smooth and the mission solutions were very creative and efficient. They posted a 380 and 400 for their first 2 scores with 2 more attempts still to go!! Los Altos Geek Squad  and We Ate The Mat , who both had impressive pneumatic robot arm attachments, had some early robot issues and posted max scores of 330 and 315 after 2 rounds, both sitting outside the top 10. Advanced attachments can be high scorers, but often require more adjustments than something simpler.

The competitions got more interesting after lunch starting with Geek Squad posting a 400 to jump to 2nd place behind Antipodes. Geek Squad left for judging and while they were away, Antipodes posted 2 360's for their last 2 scores - an amazing show of consistency. We Ate The Mat appeared to be posting a good score on round 3 when a loop flipped off the bot just before getting back to base. This cost 30 points since this eliminated the bonus loops too and they posted a 335 on the run.

In the final round, We Ate The Mat was sitting in 18th place with a 335 and only one more chance remaining to post a score. Confidence in the bot was being severely tested. However, most of the hard things had been working so they stayed calm, carefully went through their checklist, and then posted a 400 to jump to second place behind Antipodes and just ahead of Geek Squad. The creators of FLL made a smart choice of using high score rather than average score to decide the robot performance competition - not only does it promote higher risk designs, but it keeps these competitions exciting to the last minute since there is always a chance to get that one big run.

Los Altos Geek Squad, not to be deterred, was one of the last teams up for the day and calmly posted an amazing second perfect score of the day, two 400's in a row, to jump past both WATM and Antipodes to 1st place overall in robot performance. They edged out Antipodes by a mere 20 points in both teams 2nd highest score of the day.

However, the story in robot performance was not just about these 3 teams. There were at least 10 teams who appeared to have the ability to get a perfect score and it seemed every time I looked at the big screens, at least one of the bots was doing something amazing. One of my favorites was the one that climbed up and jump off the edge of the bridge - reliably!!

In the Awards Ceremony, Los Altos Geek Squad, Antipodes, and We Ate The Mat finished 1-2-3 in Robot Performance Awards. We Ate The Mat placed 2nd in the Overall Champions Award, the first Los Altos team to place in the Champions category at state since the Lego Legends in 2006. Los Altos Geek Squad placed 1st in the prestigious Robot Design category and also won 3 of the new "kids choice" awards for their impressive robot designs and attachments. The overall Champions winner was Legonauts, a strong 7 member team from Folsom, and the outstanding Antipodes team from Pacifica finished 3rd in the Champions Award Category.

Other Los Altos area teams at state were Sapphire Force, who won a kids choice award for their pit signs, and Smart Navigators , who had an excellent rookie team competition. Complete results for Northern California FLL Championship are posted at NorcalFLL Web Site.  The National web site is at: US FIRST . Congratulations to all of the Los Altos teams who competed in the Regional Qualifiers including: Fortune Cookies, LEGO Lightning, and Bionic Brother, won 1st place in the Robot Design Category at the Regional. In addition, thank you to all teams that participated this year in the 2009 Los Altos Qualifier.

Remember that in FLL, what you learn is more important that what you win . Reminding yourself of this helps you stay calm when the intensity of the competition starts to build.

Updated Oct 12, 2009 :   Los Altos Robotics events for 2009 FLL season are over:

• Scrimmage, Sun, Oct 25, 2009
• Official Qualifier Tournament, Sat, Nov 21, 2009

The scrimmage is our local early event to let kids run the robots at an early stage and see what's really working. The Tournament is an official FLL qualifier tournament as described at US FIRST .

Los Altos events are open to the public and admissions is free. Events are lots of fun for spectators. If a child may want to participate in the future, they can stop by the event for an hour to see what it is like. If you are already a participant at another venue, please do not video robots. If you would like to help run the FLL tournaments, please email or call at the contact information listed below. Participation is great fun and great way to give back to the community.

The Los Altos area parent meeting was on Thursday Sep 10, 2009. There is no Los Altos coaches training scheduled for this year though there is web-based training provided by NorcalFLL.  Good luck and have fun.

Aug 30, 2009: Please note that while most of the information on this page is valid, the page has not been updated thoroughly for 2009.  We are short of volunteers to take care of the website.   Let me know if you are interested in helping out with this.

Sep 15, 2009 (Updated Sept 24):   PowerPoint Slides (pdf version) from the Sept 10 parent meeting. Thank you Michael Murray.

Good luck. If you have any other questions feel free to contact:

Michael Schuh MichaelLosAltosRobotics.Org, (650) 965-8037 (Home), or (650) 604-1460 (Work)

See what FLL is about in this video from the 2004 Los Altos local FLL tournament, No Limits. The second video is sights and sounds from the 2005 Northern California NCaFLL Ocean Odyssey state tournament:

We Ate The Mat Web Site:   with links to Open Source NXT Programming Environment.
Click Here to let us know links to other FLL team web sites.

• FIRST LEGO League is for fourth grade through 14 year olds. The fall season runs from Sep to Nov.
• Botball is for Junior High and High School students and takes place in the Winter and Spring. Los Altos Community team had a great 2008 season. See the fun here with videos from the California and National tournament.
• FIRST High School Robotics is for High School students and also takes place in the Winter and Spring.
• Our FIRST FLL regional affiliate, Playing At Learning , coordinates Northern California FLL with over 250 teams every year. In addition, they run other smaller robotics programs too such as FIRST Tech Challenge and JR. FLL.

If you would like to promote FLL in Northern California, please make a donation as a corporate sponsor or individual, to the NCaFLL coordinator, Playing At Learning, a 501c non-profit corporation.

Jan 25, 2009:   Results are in for the 2008 NCaFLL State Tournament that was held at Newark High School on Jan 24, 2009. Congratulations to all of the Los Altos teams who participated and a big thank you goes out to all the organizers and volunteers that made it happen. Overall, the Los Altos teams did a great job demonstrating teamwork and gracious professionalism.

Etamilc and Lego Lords were selected for several awards. Etamilc won the performance award with a high score of 370 and took second place in the prestigious robot design award. Etamilc's 370 was an outstanding score for the difficult Climate Connections challenge and they were honored to have a large group of robot enthusiast watching them after posting a 350 on their first run. The Lego Lords became the first Los Altos team to win in the overall research project award catagory at the state tournament with their innovative Climate Connections solution. Research project is one of the most competitive categories at state and the award announcer pointed out the difficulty in selecting award winners from the large number of high quality presentations.

UPDATE for FLL 2007: The 2007 NCaFLL state robotics tournament Sat, Jan 12th, 2008 was in Fremont. The Technostuds won an award for the alliance round. Chaotic Contraptions and Full Throttle A Corp placed in the top 20 in scoring, a great result in a very competitive tournament.

The 2007 Los Altos FLL tournament (7th annual) was Sunday, Dec 2, 2007 at Blach School with 26 teams. Click here for results for Los Altos qualifier tournament. . Click here for the event schedule and click here for the 2007 one-page flyer and click here for the 2007 Tournament Announcements .

2006Congratulations to the LEGO Legends for solving the NanoQuest challenge and taking the 1st place Champion's Award at the 2006 NCaFLL state tournament. There is a writeup in the Los Altos Town Crier. In addition, the Dogbots won the Alliance Award and the Bionic Builders were selected the best rookie team.

The Lego Legends also represented NCaFLL at the 2006 FIRST Robotics World Festival . The top teams from FLL, VEX, and High School challenges were honored to meet the president at the White House. The irony is that "meeting the president" was mentioned by one of the teams in our 2004 Los Altos FLL Video (above); however, at that time, it was a rumor that wasn't true - now it is true. Gee, you can build robots and learn how to predict the future too!

Results for the local 2006 Los Altos Robotics FIRST LEGO League tournament are available here. FLL includes both a robotics challenge AND a research project challenge. The first video below is an example of an excellent presentation from Small is Beautiful , the North Los Altos 1st place team.

The second video is the 2006 NCaFLL award presentation including the Lego Legends receiving 1st place performance and later the overall championship award. The fun of robotics is the journey. Getting an award for all your hard work is also exciting, but even if you don't get an award, you still have a great time building robots with your friends.

Results and team pictures are available here for the 2005 Northern California FLL State Competition. See the full writeup in the Los Altos Town Crier .

Watch this video of the amazing No Limits robot from the TigerBots when they won the 2004 NCaFLL state tournament. This is NOT an example of a typical FLL robot that we would use for teaching a new team. In fact is probably one of the more complex FLL robots ever created. However, it is great fun to watch.

The video on the right are other amazing No Limits robots from the 2004 FIRST Robotics World Festival that same year. The variety of robots here is impressive. These are all done with the older RCX Lego Mindstorm robotics kits (the yellow brick):

While many robotics teams from Los Altos have worked hard and demonstrated gracious professionalism, a few have been fortunate enough to be recognized at some of the major state and national robotics tournaments. The Los Altos Robotics Champions Corner recognizes those teams and we hope inspires future teams.

Los Altos Robotics was formed in 2004 to organize and promote robotics activities in Los Altos and surrounding areas. Los Altos Robotics board members have organized FLL robotics tournaments in Los Altos since 2001. This organization now contains a board of about 10 dedicated volunteers. If you want to volunteer, send one us an email and come to a board meeting. Meetings are open to the public. Click here to see the Los Altos Robotics board and a list of the upcoming board meetings.

For general questions, comments, or suggestions, please email WebmasterLosAltosRobotics.Org.

For registration questions, please visit the Participating in Los Altos Robotics FLL page first and then email MichaelLosAltosRobotics.Org or call Michael Schuh at (650) 965-8037 if you still have questions.

Currently, the Los Altos Robotics web site join and log in account is intended only for coordinators. If you are currently a member of the TigerBots email alias, you will receive the information you need in your email.

In the future, we will transition to the member facility here and will notify the TigerBots email list when this happens.