FIRST LEGO League is an educational extracurricular activity for youth ages 9-14. This event focuses on teamwork, societal challenges, and STEM. Teams have been working together since August and learning to build and program competitive autonomous robots, which must complete various tasks on their own within a given time to earn points.
RAPID CITY, S.D. (Dec. 1, 2017) – South Dakota School of Mines & Technology will host the 2017 FIRST LEGO League Rapid City Qualifier from 10 a.m.-5 p.m., on Saturday, Dec. 2. in the Surbeck Center Ballroom (Campus Map)
FIRST LEGO League is an educational extracurricular activity for youth ages 9-14. This event focuses on teamwork, societal challenges, and STEM. Teams have been working together since August and learning to build and program competitive autonomous robots, which must complete various tasks on their own within a given time to earn points.
This year’s event includes 18 registered teams, which is a record number for this competition. Additionally, the junior league will feature another six teams of 6-10 year old students. In total the FIRST LEGO League will include well over 100 youth participants.
The theme this year is hydro dynamics. The challenges associated with this help students learn all about water, including how it’s found, transported, used, or disposed of.
Teams will have a project to identify societal challenges within the water cycle and propose a solution for addressing that challenge. The competition is divided into four parts consisting of core values, project presentation, robot design judging, and robot games.
The FIRST LEGO League qualifier is held in coordination with EmBe, which is this FIRST LEGO League state affiliate. Caterpillar is a major sponsor of the event. The company supports many of the teams at the Rapid City Qualifier.