On Saturday February 15, 2003 a local FLL competition was held in Nashua NH. The purpose of the tournament was to give a venue to teams that had not had an opportunety to compete all year. The remainder of the tournament where local teams wanting a second opportunety to show their stuff.

The tournament was held at Bicentennial Elementary School. The pit area was in the cafeteria and competition area in the gym. Research Presentations and tech judging where done in adjacent classrooms. A good number of volunteers made the setup, running, and teardown a breeze. Thanks to all that made this a great experience.

One notable event make this a novel day. At the conclusion of the finals teams must normally wait a period of time for the judges to decide on the winners. During this time, we elected to give the teams a new challenge. We picked pairs of random teams to form alliances. Each alliance would get one run at a competition table (two practice tables) working together. Each team would run their robot on their own side. They would only be given 1 1/2 minutes to accomplish as much as possible. At the end of the round, the two tables would be scored on only one score sheet. Duplicated missions would therefore only count once. It was up to the teams to spend the 5-10 minutes we gave them to work out a strategy for not duplicating effort and hence to maximize the their combined score.

It worked out very nicely. It was a complete surprise to everyone execpt the tournament director and his chief judge. This maintained the excitement during this normaly dead time. Alliances also had a chance to bond before the award ceremony. As a result, teams that did not know each other prior where cheering for each other at the awards. Of course it did not hurt to hand out 1st and 2nd place trophies to the alliance winners!

Award Winners

Detailed Results