Girraween Regional First Lego League(FLL)

all for 150 seconds competition time! Nerve racking, well for the students!

4 min readNov 23, 2022

FLL — it’s the First Lego League event. This is an alliance with FIRST & LEGO Education. FIRST stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science & Technology. So cool:)

This event of FLL — Girraween Regional was possible due to the active arrangement from AARAS — Australian Academy of Robotics And Science. It all started when my son joined Girraween Public School in 2018. So, enrolled him with AARAS at Girraween school to initiate the coding through scratch. And AARAS is the leading provider of Coding, Robotics and STEM education nationally.

This article is my view of what happened on 13 Nov 2022, FLL -Girraween Regional event.

Preparation: There is lot of excitement about this event. I had been a Judge once earlier in 2020. It was good experience, but all virtual due to COVID 19. Face to face interaction and judging would have been more fun and in the thick of action.

Now, the referee role is more active role during the game. Right on the table where the actions happens. There is lot of preparation to be done for the Referee role, atleast for the first time.

Understand the FLL game and the theme for this year. “Super Powered”
Understand the rules — there are many.
Understand the missions. There are 14 of them.
But also make it fun for the kids team!

Thanks to Dr. Fred Westling, Head Referee, Australia who had created a 2.5 hours of video material explaining the theme, missions, possible call outs during the game. And also what’s considered as allowed/not allowed, how to speak to kids etc. The training material(pdf) was also very exhaustive and tried to pin point each of the situation which could happen and how referees can respond to the same in a snap. Though I had gone through the entire training video was not confident until I saw the real FLL table

13 Nov 22, Sunday, was a big day. We arrived at the school and lo, almost every volunteer was there!. It was just 7.45 am in the morning, but buzzing with lot of energy. Volunteers were varied in age and all were looking forward for performing their role. Chintan Shah, Tournament Director and Head of AARAS, initiated the conversation with the volunteers, set the expectation and All set !. Infact, the AARAS team had been doing many arrangements even before the event, so that all the students who come for the event, feel welcomed and at their best to perform on the D-day.

Thanks to Manan, Head Referee for Girraween Regional who explained the rules again on the actual table to myself and my fellow referee, Dirk. At this time, it made more sense on what went through during the training videos and what is allowed/disallowed.

emcee by Pranav and Kiana. They started off the tournament with the Australia National Anthem.

There were many other volunteers for : Registration, helping out the participants, compering the entire event — more of extempore running commentary of the game. pre game, during the game and post game interviews. It was very well anchored. Practice table on the side, helped the participants to finalize their strategy and improvised during different rounds!. Each team’s table across the performance hall was eye capturing with the display of medals/trophies won by them. Great to have the parents turn up for the event and cheering them.

The referee role was very interesting. Each team had their own strategy. One team came up with 4 missions and completed it in 90 seconds. And then Waited for the entire timer (2 min and 30 seconds) to finish the game. Some teams were full on and completed many missions in their own style. Few of the Lego Robots didn’t work as planned. The robot had to be reset and tried again and lo! it worked.

It was difficult to watch the multiple missions and keep note of what’s happening. After couple of games, got used to the rhythm of how the students/teams are performing it. Thanks to Head referee, Manan who was always there to support the clarifications. Thanks to the students volunteers from AARAS who helped in many activities including resetting the table after each game.

With the first game started around 9 am, the entire schedule was packed and last game was around 2pm that afternoon. 3 rounds for each team. So this helped the teams to improvise after each round and try to get more points from the previous rounds!. The joy on their faces after successfully completing each mission was priceless! The team work, really worked.

The Awards and Closing ceremony was at its best. The most awaited moments for the team in knowing where they got finally in the competition. Different category of the Awards like Innovation, Engineering, Robo Design. Each team who won the awards were elated to receive and others took the learnings with them.

A great event, planned and conducted by AARAS, for the 4th consecutive year and many more to come in future years.

Visit AARAS website for more information