Use the form below to join the waitlist for our FIRST Lego League Challenge program in Bolton, MA for students in grades 4-8.
Thank you for your interest in FIRST Lego League (FLL)
Challenge. The Bolton FLL Robotics Team at
Florence Sawyer school is a robotics club for students in grades 4 thru 8.
FIRST stands for “for inspiration and recognition of science and technology.”
It is a worldwide robotics organization offering robot competitions
tailored to middle school students and to high school students.
We accept new team members from our waiting list in our Spring
season (current 4th graders are the youngest we accept) in April.
The spring season is an informal series of weekly meetings on Wednesdays after
school until 5:30 pm in small groups with several coaches to give the kids a
lot of learning and hands-on time. The kids learn both building and
programming, from simple to complex. This prepares the new team members
for the fall competition season. We have learned from experience that
adding new inexperienced team members in the fall is very challenging, so new
teammates only join in the spring. It’s better to give them time to learn
and have fun before we need to get down to business.
In the fall competition season, the task is to design, build
and program a fully autonomous robot to complete missions during a competition.
Students are also required to complete a locally based research project on
an original game theme set by FLL every year. The project involves
innovating with an existing technology or coming up with a new idea and
presenting the idea to interested groups. The kids are also required to work
collaboratively as a team. Look online for this year’s challenge: https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/fll . We meet weekly from the first day of school through mid-December, Wednesdays after school to 5:30 pm with some evening
meetings and weekend competitions in late October, November and December.
We are a parent-run team, each family is required to have
one parent volunteer in this club. Some parents coach a robotics team (we
help you learn) , some parents coach a team on their community-oriented
research project, some organize fundraising or team building events (we are
also self-funded and there is a yearly activity fee of $175 per student).
To be a coach or volunteer, you don’t have to know anything about
robotics (I didn’t when I started), you just need to find a good volunteer job
for yourself. The number of students we can have in the program is
directly proportional to the number of parent volunteer coaches. We won’t
know how many we can accept next year until we know how many parent volunteers
we will have for those positions.
Good behavior is very important for a group like ours.
Our typical team member is interested in robotics, a self-starter when
necessary and able to pay attention and follow detailed directions. Don’t
sign up your kid if they don’t want to do robotics, leave that slot for a kid
who wants to be here. They don’t need to
know anything about Lego Spike Prime robots or Python programming to join, but they have to
be interested.
You will be emailed in March for the
upcoming training season in April-June. Program
registration is first offered to families who have previously participated in
our programs. As space is available, families on the waitlist will be contacted
about registration.
Due to the overwhelming interest in this program, we have a long
waiting list and cannot take every kid.
If you are interested in starting an FLL Challenge team in your home for
your child and their friends, we can help support you.
You are not signing up for any particular program or event through this form. This form is not binding. It is only to receive further information when it becomes available for the next season.
Please fill out the form once for each student that is interested in the program.
You can reach out to michelle.tuck@littletonrobotics.org with any questions.
