Lego League Coaching

Welcome to Lego League Coaching! I put this site together to help first time Lego League coaches to learn the ins and outs of coaching that I had to learn on my own. The site is divided up into sections related to each of the judging criteria. Here is a map of various posts to [...]

I received the new field kit for Senior Solutions a few weeks ago and now finally have time to write about it. In case you haven’t seen the mat layout, here it is: I’m struck by the fact that there are a lot of obstacles this year. Nothing is easy to get to. I’m also [...]

I finally got around to finishing the new version of my scoring app. It is now available in the Android market. I had hoped to do a little more with it, but I just didn’t have time. And won’t. But it should still work fine.       The missoin images in this app came [...]

It’s hard to believe it’s October already. Hopefully you’ve met once or twice with your team by now. If not, don’t fear, many others haven’t either. But don’t delay too long. There is a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. One thing you need to make sure you do [...]

I spent a good part of the weekend getting the Food Factor field kit put together. While last year’s Body Forward involved a lot of precision, this year’s challenge involves a lot of maneuvering. All of the Dual Locked pieces create a bit of a maze. There really isn’t a straight shot to anything (except [...]

When my doorbell rang last night, I didn’t know what to expect when I answered the door as I wasn’t expecting anyone. Was it a neighbor kid wanting to play with one of mine? Was it someone wanting to sell me something? Or maybe one of those religious zealots telling me how to find God? [...]

I’m a software developer by trade. It’s one of the reasons I was tapped to be a Lego League coach even before my daughter was of age. I recently wanted to learn how to develop Android apps and was trying to decide what I could build to understand how it is done. I realized that [...]

Smooth Acceleration With regional/qualifying tournaments looming, your team probably has most of its programs done and you are doing some final tweaks before competition. I have one last tip for the year. You may have noticed that when you put a motor block into your program, it defaults to 75% power. If you don’t change [...]

Smooth Motor Movement You may have noticed that if you put two motor blocks together with a certain duration of degrees, the robot does kind of a stutter-step. It pauses for a split second between blocks. There is a way around this to produce smooth motor movement. First, let’s do it the obvious way. Create [...]

When you get to technical judging, there will be a Game table set up just like at the performance runs. There are generally two judges: one to judge your robot design, and one to judge your programs. Your team will be asked to run their missions and describe what is happening with their robot. They [...]