For the last 4 years, Avum has proudly sponsored teams of budding engineers in the FIRST LEGO League. FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) was founded by Dean Kamen in 1989 and the LEGO competition was started in 1998. The 2013 FIRST LEGO season will have over 200,000 competitors in 70 countries.
Avum provides sponsorship by helping the team with necessary supplies such as LEGO Robotics kits and team shirts as well as having one of our engineers, Robin Hobbensiefken, volunteer as a coach and mentor for the team. Through this sponsorship, Avum has helped to inspire many children to have an interest in science, technology and engineering. This experience provides the young engineers with practical experience that they can use in school and in their future careers.
The cornerstones of the FLL are to encourage children to learn about science and technology with a primary focus on having strong core values and showing gracious professionalism. The core values emphasized in the competition include such beliefs as:
- We honor the spirit of friendly competition
- What we discover is more important than what we win
- We share our experiences with others
- We have fun!
The FLL is an annual contest with regional competitions in the first and second week of December. Teams generally begin work on their project around the time school starts in the fall. Students must be in the age range of 9 – 14 and teams consist of 3 to 10 members. Each year the project has a primary theme such as human health (Body Forward), food safety (Food Factor) or helping the elderly (Senior Solutions). LEGO engineers have around 10 weeks to prepare themselves for competition which consists of 3 main parts:
- A research project presentation
- A presentation on core values including a teamwork exercise
- The robot game competition
Each season, the engineers research a topic and design an innovative solution. For the Senior Solutions season, the LEGO Whippersnappers, took top honors at the First LEGO League (FLL) robotics regional championships held December 1st at Memorial Middle School in Albany, OR. The team won both the Robot Performance Award and the Director’s Award, which is presented to the team that receives top scores in four areas: robot performance, robot design/programming, research project presentation, and team work. The Whippersnappers designed a personal medication dispenser for in-home use by seniors, especially those experiencing the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
In 2013, the contest is focused on natural disasters and is titled “Nature’s Fury”. Avum has a team of four members this year all of whom are returning from past teams. Three of this season’s engineers are returning Whippersnappers. The 4th member is returning after being on the team 3 years ago when they were the Central LEGO Tigers. This season, the team is researching flooding and is specifically focused on working to develop a way to help the deaf community in dealing with natural disasters.