CS7 - Cutting the Ribbon, Officially Underway

Greetings FIRST LEGO League Oregon,

In today's FIRST LEGO League Oregon Update we will cover these items:

1. Oregon Qualifying Tournament Applications
2. Oregon Qualifying Tournaments
3. What to expect at a Qualifying Tournament
4. AI and Tensorflow (Computer Object Detection) seminar
5. Adding team members to the FIRST digital Roster
6. Using the Team Meeting guide

Use this link to read this update as a blog post

  If you are new to this email or blog this is the place where you will find all of the OREGON specific FIRST LEGO League information, as well as helpful guides to get your team through the CITY SHAPER FIRST LEGO League season. Coaches and team administrators in the FIRST system for the CITY SHAPER season will be added every Monday until March, automatically. Every update this season begins with CS (CITY SHAPER) and a number, that number lets you know which update it is, if you miss an update you can find it on our blog.

1) Oregon Qualifying Tournament Applications

ORTOP is now accepting applications for the Intel Oregon FIRST LEGO League Qualifying Tournaments.  To apply your team must be nationally registered with FIRST.  If you need help with that please email Loridee-Wetzel@ortop.org.  Did you team sign up for a class pack, but want to send a group or two to participate?  I can help you with that as well!

To start your application please go to this website.  Remember if you did not receive team support to cover the qualifying tournament fee your team needs to pay BEFORE they will be assigned to an event, you may lose your preference!


Not quite half of the teams expected this season have signed up, so most events still have room!

2) Oregon Qualifying Tournaments

LOCATION AND WEBSITE	CITY	TOURNAMENT DATES 2019	VOLUNTEER LINK
Mountain View High School	Bend	December 15	Dec 15
Oregon State University	Corvallis	December 7 & 8	Dec 7 Dec 8
North Middle School	Grants Pass	December 7	Dec 7
Intel Jones Farm Conference Center	Hillsboro	December 14 & 15	Dec 14 Dec 15
Hillsboro High School – Spanish/English Event Escuela secundaria de Hillsboro-Evento en Español Hillsboro High School (English)	Hillsboro	December 7 Diciembre 7 December 8	Dec 7 Dec 8
Hood River Middle School	Hood River	December 7 & 8	Dec 7 Dec 8
Eastern Oregon University	La Grande	December 7	Dec 7
Hedrick Middle School	Medford	December 14	Dec 14
Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum	McMinnville	December 14 & 15	Dec 14 Dec 15
South Umpqua High School	Myrtle Creek/Roseburg	December 7	Dec 7
Treasure Valley Community College*	Ontario	December 14
Catlin Gabel School	Portland	December 14 & 15	Dec 14 Dec 15
Concordia University	Portland	December 15	Dec 15
Stephens Middle School	Salem	December 7 & 8	Dec 7 Dec 8
The Dalles Middle School	The Dalles	December 14	Dec 14
Mentor Graphics Commons	Wilsonville	December 14 & 15	Dec 14 Dec 15

*Advances to the South Idaho Championship Tournament again this year – tournament being co-managed by Idaho 4-H Extension Robotics - Registration will happen through Idaho 4-H.

3) What to expect at a Qualifying Tournament

While the qualifying tournaments are still a few months away, it's good to know what to plan for. Here is an introductory video filmed at our events last year.
In English

In Spanish


Thank you to Intel for making these videos possible as well as the volunteers at the Parkrose Middle School and Hillsboro High School tournaments last year. 

As you can see in the video, the first thing you will need is your roster from FIRST and any additional FIRST Consent forms for your team members, or chaperones. Directions for adding people to your digital roster will be in section 5 of this email. You will also need to bring everything your team needs for the day and store this in your pit area. The pit is your teams semi-secure home for the day. This is where you will charge your robot, make changes to your robot for that third mission to succeed, and exchange ideas with other teams. While candy sharing is discouraged because of allergies, it is perfectly fine to exchange cards, stickers, or other small trinkets.  It is strongly encouraged for teams to share their favorite parts of FIRST LEGO League with each other in this safe space. 

Teams should learn about each other's Innovation Project solutions and see how they have chosen different solutions and problems to address. Teams should also feel free to exchange ideas around the robot game. Sharing different ways of solving the same problem is extremely powerful for teams to experience with their peers.  Additionally, seeing more advanced and more basic solutions that the team did not think of is a better learning tool than all the team meetings and lectures a team could have in a single year.

The qualifying tournament is also the time when the team will finally acknowledge whatever that thing is that you want them to recognize all season. You could have pointed it out every meeting this year, but here at the qualifying tournament, when they hear it from a peer, that is when it will matter to them. I don't know what that thing is yet, but by November you will have a good idea of it. Every team goes through this and it's a magic moment for coaches each year.

One more important thing that is not mentioned in the video.  Just like all of FIRST LEGO League, at the tournament, the only job of the coach is to monitor the safety of the team. The adults with the team are not to carry items, touch the robot, or the computer.  If you need access to the quiet room or to know where the non-binary bathroom is, please ask the Pit Admin.  If you see something that is concerning to you (other than daisy-chained power strips - yes I know, but the draw is so low that the risk of fire is almost non-existant and the fire marshal walks through the state championship where this happens), please let the pit admin, judge advisor, head referee, or tournament director know as soon as possible.     

4) AI and Tensorflow (Computer Object Detection) seminar

When: Saturday, Oct 12 from 2:30pm to 4PM
Where: Beaverton Municipal Ct. Room 340, 4755 SW Griffith Dr. Beaverton, OR 97005
Registration: Please register on Eventbrite at http://tiny.cc/fni0dz
The speaker: Milind Pandit, is an Artificial Intelligence Architect from Intel. He works with Intel’s customers and partners who have products and services that use AI and ML. Milind will cover the following topics:

• What is AI? 30k view
• What is training v/s inference
• Types of image-based AI (classification, object detection, segmentation)
• Where do people typically get pre-trained models?
• Programming choices - Tensorflow, OpenCV, etc.
• Interactive Demo
• Q&A

*This event is NOT organized by ORTOP

5) Adding team members to the FIRST digital Roster

Normally, I cover this later in the season, but my inbox tells me that some coaches are trying to stay on top of the paperwork aspect of their role.  The FIRST digital roster is one of those special challenges for every coach. First, while a printout of the roster is required at your qualifying tournament, the only names required to appear on it through the FIRST system are your Lead Coach/Mentors. Everyone else can submit a paper consent form that is printable from the Contacts section of the Lead Coach/Mentor's Dashboard. 

However, if you want to make it just one piece of paper that you can print anytime with everyone's information on it. This is possible, although you may need to help the parents of your team members to do this.

The most important thing the parents need is the official team number. While you can invite the parents through the FIRST Dashboard Contacts, most of those emails get filtered as spam, it can be easier to hand the parents this website, or even better, have everyone complete this task at a team meeting. Each child must have a parent with a FIRST account and a valid email address. If this is not the case, please just print the paper forms. It also helps if they have good English reading comprehension as the FIRST website is not available in other languages. 

After the parents have signed up their child and applied to your team, you will need to go back into the FIRST system and accept each child to your team. When you do this make sure their consent form has been signed by the parent. It is easy for parents to miss this step, and in the end, you still need a paper consent form if this is missing. Defeating the entire purpose of going through this activity. 
If you have further questions, your best option is to contact FIRST at firstlegoleague@firstinspires.org or by calling 1-800-871-8326 ext 0

6) Using the Team Meeting guide

Vitruvius

Goals to check off this week

• Team can manipulate LEGO structures into a designated position
• Team can program the robot for straight and curved moves in different ways
• Team understands how to use a waypoint between moves (see ORTOP Workshop 3 for definition of a waypoint)
• Team is comfortable with identifying a problem, client, expert, and starting a solution
• Team can build a prototype to represent their thinking (this will be necessary for Mission 11)
• The team should understand the Core Value of Teamwork

This is the last of the practices for the Innovative Project. Starting in the next meeting your team will be working on their problem and solution. It is a great idea to finish today’s meeting with a vote on topics that interest the team so that team members can bring in research to go over next time. In this final spark exercise, it is very important that the team start to think beyond the obvious. Sure you could use a drone, and this is being done, but is there a better solution that your community could use? Can something be combined with the drone to make the data it provides more useful? What kind of data will you get back? How is that going to be processed?

It is also important that the team think about Mission 11, where they will build their project idea out of the bag 10 LEGO elements to bring to the qualifying tournament in December. Their model must be robust enough to be transported by the robot. What does that look like?

In this session, we finally get to use the table.  Don’t worry if your mat isn’t perfectly flat, the one at your tournament most likely won’t be either. Your team will continue to build and refine programming skills with a basic robot, but in this session, they will learn that the basic tribot might not be enough to compete in CITY SHAPER. How do changes affect the robot? Does it increase drift? What about the robot’s stability? Does it work better if you drive it backward? Should you add more tires, what would that do to the programming? Best to learn all of this now before we get to the more complicated programming in the next session!

Workshop III in the ORTOP workshop series is going to be a big help for this session. After you do the two LEGO lessons, I highly recommend reviewing the videos and powerpoint associated with this workshop even if you were not able to attend the workshop in person. There are great techniques that are important to consider now that the robot is moving to a targeted area. 

Now is also a good time to talk about how your team will utilize your robot.  Will it have onboard attachments that they use for all or most of the missions the team will attempt? Will there be multiple attachments? If so, how will they connect to the robot so that all of them work? Will you need to use more motors? Remember you can only use 4 total, including the attachments.

Lots of questions this week. Next week, work on the project begins in earnest. There are 3 more robot lessons, including the Crane Mission. It’s also a good time to come together as a team. Teamwork is the only way it’s all going to get done!

And that is this week! It's been a big one with National Registration coming to an end and Qualifying Tournament applications pouring in. I look forward to setting into the groove of the season along with all of you. Please keep sending in questions, please keep sending updates. I hope to see some of you this weekend, and if not at an event this December!

Best Wishes,
Loridee

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