Me and Lucia at the Robotics Competition that LREI hosted!

On Sunday, January 29, LREI hosted the FLL Robotics qualifier at the high school. Since it was at our school, we got our own room to practice in. There are three parts of the FLL Robotics Competition. They are the robot, where there are challenges made of Legos for the robot to solve, and we have to make the robot complete those challenges. The second part is he research. Every year there is a theme, and this year was Animal Allies, so you had to choose a topic about the relationship between humans and animals then come up with a solution and present it. We chose the problem of sea turtles eating plastic bags. Did you know the #1 man-made thing in the ocean is plastic bags? Another part in the Robot Design; how the robot is designed.The last part is Core Values. The core values are Cooperitition (cooperation+competition,) Discovery, Integration, and Inclusion. This year you had to make a poster about your team using these Core Values, and one other that you chose. We chose to talk about Kids Do the Work. In our practice room we had the mat for the robots, and we had some computers for research. The 6th grade team went out to the Student Center to practice research. We did it about 5 times, and we all memorized our parts. We then practiced Core Values, and that went well too. We worked on the robot and then had lunch. Shortly after, it was time to go to robot design. We all went up bringing the robots, and everything including programs, computers, and our poster for Core Values. Next we went to CV and we had to look at a picture and tell the story. We then presented our poster, and they seemed to enjoy it. We went off to research, and they also seemed to be interested and it looked like they enjoyed it. We went down stairs to practice robots a little more, then we had to go to the robot comp. To be honest we did not do too well. Our robot started veering, but I still had fun. Then it was time for them to announce awards, and to our surprise we got 1st place CV!! That meant we would move on! And also to our surprise the 7th and 8th grade team got the champions award! In the end, it was a really awesome day, and we can’t wait for the text comp which is next weekend. March 4th!

On Tuesday we went and did a little exit poll. Some of us went to the street at some voting places. We asked as many people as we could some questions. The questions were: Who did you vote for? How old are you? What is your gender? What was the most important issue for you when choosing a presidential candidate? Are you a Republican or Democrat? How happy are you with the choices for the candidates in you party? 1 being very unhappy and 5 being very happy. Some of us stayed at school and did a school survey. One person in each group exit polling was the data collector. They put all of the data in their group onto one sheet. That would be sent to the data processors. They took all the information and put it into graphs and percentages.

I learned that primaries are actually very important in the voting process. I used to think that the primaries were not very important. After the exit polling I was very surprised that there were only 21 republican voters that we polled. I thought there would be more democrats but I still thought there would be more than 21 republicans. I was also surprised that Kasich won in this neighborhood. The data collectors got percentages for Sanders and Clinton. The came out with Clinton being 67% and Sanders 33%. On Wednesday we looked at the actual percentages from the neighborhood. Clinton was 67% and Sanders was 33%! We got it exact! (Great job data processors!) I did not think that would be the outcome.

I was in the school survey group. We interviewed all the teachers who were available. I was very surprised that only one person in all the people we interviewed was republican. We did not get the results from the school, but Lars, Farin, and me all agree the winner in our school was probably Bernie Sanders. It was a really fun day, and I really liked how accurate our results came out.