A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY

In the school year 2003-2004, we joined the FIRST Lego League (FLL). Our "Schmall Schmoes" designed programmable robots from LEGO MindStorms Robotics and won awards for their original research and team spirit!

Our second-year FLL team won the Director's Award (the top award) at LEGOLAND, in the Southern California FLL Competition! Amazing!!! Thanks to all those dedicated people from LEGOLAND, from FIRST Robotics, the mentors and friends from other schools, Mrs. Bruesch and our parents and friends, the Schmall Schmoes are on top of the world!

2005 Marked the first year that both teams - FRC and FLL - were invited to the Nationals 4/21 - 4/23, at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia! Congratulations to our students for a job well done!

In early October, 2005, FIRST will announce the NEW VEX challenge for this year. Whitney is looking forward to starting up our first VEX Robotics team this year!

Though we built a great robot and had an amazing research presentation, we did not win anything. With dejection in our hearts we decided to wait until next year to pull off a miraculous win!

THIS YEAR...

After landing on Mars, diving under into the deep blue seas, helping mankind on Earth, we now shrink ourselves to explore the wonderful and promising world of nanotechnology. We zoom ourselves through the use of a super high-powered atomic microscope to the strange world of individual atoms, where everything is in motion.

As implied above, this year's mission is dubbed "Nano Quest" which involves the use of nanotechnology. Using a new Mindstorms NXT kit, we have built a robot that can accomplish the missions of the new challenge. Such missions vary from manipulating individual atoms to testing the strength of nanotubes.

In addition to completing the mission, we have worked on the research project portion of this year's game. Please see "Our Research Project" for more details.

The new LEGO Mindstorms NXT robot.

This year's team is composed of many people. We have successfully selected ten members out of many to be on the official FLL Team 628. These members worked hard and thus accomplishing the goal of earning a place on the team. Each member has been carefully chosen by the coach(es) and captain. Each individual named below has sufficient knowledge in either research, building, and/or programming.

These members are:

Ian V. (Captain)
Shafqat H.
Katherine S.
Joe L.
Nitin
Darren C.
Raymond D.
Eric (Alternate)
Benjamin F. (Alternate)

Please understand that we have lost our forum due to their server being down, therefore, I can't list all the members on the team at this point.

The team at Manhattan Beach competition - 2006.