Landroids is a FIRST Lego League (FLL) team formed in August 2007, consisting of a group of mostly 6^th grader friends from Livingston, New Jersey. It started as a dream of a 6-year old boy, Karlin, who was fascinated with LEGO. Since 2002, he dragged along one or two friends to each State Championship tournament, bought identical FLL T-shirts, and wore them to school on Fridays. These loyal companions later became part of the team Landroids.

In 2006, 10-year old Karlin joined a local robotic club and had his first taste of the FLL. The FLL experience was extremely challenging and fulfilling; but no one else in the school understood such passion.

In order to share this exciting experience with more of his friends, in 2007, he decided to form his own team by calling on his 6^th-grade buddies from school, where Stanley Cheung, Jeffrey Dong, Gregory Vuong, Gage Farestad, and Jonathan Chen signed on immediately. Zach Katz, a 5^th grader from Morris Plains, whom Karlin met during the 2006 FLL tournament, joined the team in September.

Karlin begged his parents to coach the team, promised to sort out his LEGO pieces, study hard and clean his room. Not wanting to disappoint this group of enthusiastic children, John Yeh and Pearl Hwang took on the challenge to be the rookie coaches for this rookie team. They had originally registered Landroids under Lancer Robotics Club, following Livingston’s tradition in naming all its town teams as “Lancer”, hoping that Landroids would kick-start a town-wide FIRST robotic program for the Livingston school district in the future. However, since the Club was not affiliated with schools, the club name was later changed and now known as the Livingston Robotics Club.

In the beginning, most members were inexperienced with Mindstorm and Lego Technic construction, none knew how to program using NXT, only two had previously worked with RCX. In order to have an adequate hands-on experiece, every team member was required to have his own NXT kit, organized the LEGO parts in a tackle box, and equipped with a laptop for the meetings. From early September to December, the team meet 3 times a week every weekend (minimum 10 hours per week). Fridays are for the project research, Saturdays are for the robotic construction, and Sundays are for the robotic programming. Weekly research assignments plus a series of mini exercises were given.

With a limited budget, coach John spent weeks in August designing and building a lightweight interlocking furniture-grade play table, which was made out of slabs of doors. The result was a table that even IKEA would have been be proud of. The table took a permanent place in coach John’s living room, and the door was opened in September 2007 to the team. Due to popular requests, the instructions for constructing such light-weight, sectional table was posted on our team website.  Four more similar tables were later built for other FLL teams in town.

In its rookie FLL “Power Puzzle” season (2008-08), Landroids surprisingly received the NJ State Champion’s Award, and proceeded to win the 2nd place Robot Design and 3rd place Robot Performance with two rounds of perfect robot performance scores at the FLL World Festival in Atlanta.  Following Landroids’ initial success, the team has received many requests and interests in joining the Landroids. Due to limitation on team size and resources, Landroids has devoted much of its team time in outreach events to help start up new teams, and expanding Livingston Robotics Club so that more students can have the opportunity in participating in similar robotics and science competitions outside of school classrooms.

In its second FLL “Climate Connections” season (2008-09), again representing NJ as the State Champion, Landroids took home the 1st place Champion’s Award and 1st place Robot Alliance at the FLL US Open in Ohio.  Due to the team’s dedication in mentoring and community outreach, Landroids has also received the the ultimate recognition with the Founder’s Award.  In the summer of 2009, five Landroids members collectively prepared a 5-weeks, 10 hours total of “Kids Teaching Kids” FLL seminars, in preparation of 8 new FLL teams throughout NJ.  This summer project was written and presented by all Landroids’ 7th graders. Its PowerPoint slides were later translated in Thai and became the official training materials for the Thailand FLL committee to start this program with 20 new FLL teams in their country for the 2009-10 season.

After year round of hard work, Landroids in its 3rd FLL season (2009-10), received a 1st place in Robot Design at the NJ FLL State tournament, but lost out on going back to the FLL World Festival in Atlanta again. The team was extremely disappointed, but immediately regroup to continued its research in the science project throughout the winter months, and entered into a national web-based science competition sponsored by the US Army called the eCYBERMISSION.  After the project submission, Landroids went on to volunteered at the World Festival, showcased the only robot that can climb the “Smart Move” bridge. Upon returning home, the team competed in the international Google X PRIZE sponsored Moonbots challenge, hosted a town-wide robotics exhibition, then traveled to Baltimore, MD for a week-long of eCYBERMISSION finalist selection.  By the summer of 2010, Landroids has received the 1st place 8th grade national eCYBERMISSION award and selected as the top 20 Moonbots finalist teams.

For team Landroids, both the science research and the robotics design were equally important. Community outreach and volunteering to promote FIRST and STEM also occupy lots of our team time.

Starting in September 2010, Landroids will advance to the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) division.  The team members by age could participate in FLL  for one more season, but we are ready to learn new skills and be in a new arena.

The FIRST tournaments require students to apply engineering, science, math, research, writing, and presentation skills to compete in the annual international science and robotic challenges. The emphasis on teamwork and gracious professionalism are the biggest draw for Landroids to advocate for FIRST. We always look forward to meeting other LEGO robotic enthusiasts while studying up on real world science issues.