On December 12th, Forty-six teams from 9 qualifying tournaments throughout the State gathered at the 2009 New Jersey FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Smart Move State Championship tournament at Mt. Olive High School. Five teams from Livingston Robotics Club (LRC) participated in this all-day event. Landroids #109 took the 1st place Robot Design Award while Thunderclan #3375 from LRC covered the 2nd place Robot Design Award.

In our 3rd and final FLL season, Landroids, the two times State Champion’s Award winner, passed the torch of the State Champions and FLL ambassador title to The Atoms Family #4832 from Flanders, NJ.  The Champion’s Award is the most prestigious award in FLL, given to a team who in the big picture, was the strongest in all of the 5 categories combined: Research, Robot Design, Robot Performance, Teamwork and FLL values.  This 4th-year team, The Atoms Family, will be representing New Jersey at the FLL World Festival in April 2010 at Atlanta, Georgia to compete with 84 teams from 35 countries.

Best of luck to The Atoms Family, have fun at the World Festival!

The 2nd place Champion’s Award winner, the NanoGurus #6831, is a 4th-year team from Parsippany, and also this year’s 2nd place Robot Performance winner. HMS Platinum from Hillsborough achieved two rounds of perfect 400 points, easily took the 1st place Robot Performance Award.

All teams had spent the morning going through the “Smart Move” research project presentations, robot design interviews, and team work challenges. These three categories each comprised of 25% of the total scores.  The afternoon robot rounds account for the final 25% of the scores, but was the most exciting part to watch.  The LRC teams had a very inconsistent robot performance results in the afternoon.  Landroids who could draw a crowd at the pit area with 400 points rounds, could not repeat it at the competition tables, only came away with 300 points to ranked #9.  Thunderclan likewise was struggling with 190 points until the last 315 point round to take the #7 spot.  Meanwhile, Alpha Force and r2d2 grabbed the 13th & 14th places, with Landrias ended up at #16 out of 46 teams.

This concluded the intense and exciting three months of our FLL season. Check out the “Smart Move” robot missions videos from Landroids and Landrias. These big brother and little sister teams were trained together but had developed very different design styles.

For the Daily Record video coverage of this event, click here.

For The AlternativePress news 12/23/09, click here.

For the complete 2009 NJ State FLL winner list, see nycnjfirst.org website.