Help FLL Team Crocs in Socks go to Houston!

Hi, we are Team Crocs in Socks, a FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL) robotics team (#25100) made up of seven 4th-6th grade students from Marcellus Central School District in Marcellus, NY. We won the Champions Award at the Finger Lakes FLL Regional Championship on February 18th, and are one of only 108 teams (out of an initial 20,000) who earned the opportunity to compete at the FIRST® World Championship held in Houston, TX, from April 19-22. We are very excited to represent our community and connect with STEM students from all over the world. To get there, we need your support!

More than just robotics - what is FLL?

FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) LEGO® League is built around theme-based challenges to engage students in research, problem-solving, coding, and engineering. It is an accessible, guided, global robotics competition, helping students and coaches to build a better future together. FLL teams from around the world compete in four categories - Robot Game, Robot Design, Innovation Project, and Core Values.

Our journey to the World Championship began in August 2022, and led us through a series of team building exercises, research projects, and interviews with people from our community working in the field of sustainable energy. Our team placed first overall at the Qualifier event in Penfield, NY, in December 2022. From there, we advanced to the Regionals, but not before revising our process and improving our robot and innovation designs.

Robot

FLL teams design and program robots to complete autonomous missions on a game field in 2.5 minute competitions.

We designed our robot to have 2 light sensors, 1 lift motor with dog gear, 2 drive motors, and a caster ball on the back for lower friction, andprogrammed it using EV3 classroom. We built unique attachments to guide the robot through multiple missions with great success. Judges commended the simplicity of our robot design and we placed second in the Robot Game at the Qualifier and sixth at Regionals.

Innovation Project

Every FLL team develops an innovation project based on a real-world challenge provided by FIRST® each year. This year’s theme, “SuperPowered”, asked teams to explore challenges associated with generating, distributing, storing and consuming energy.

After doing broad research on renewable energy, energy consumption and energy predictions, the team chose to zero in on developing a solution to the question "How can we reduce energy consumption in our community?" We learned that heating and cooling accounts for the most residential energy usage and started looking into ways to reduce that usage. Through research, discussion, and multiple tests, we designed a prototype as a solution to that problem. Using iterative development, we have continued to modify, test and collect feedback on our prototype. 

Using a little humor and a lot of charisma, we presented our innovation project to a panel of judges at both the Qualifier and Regional tournaments. We placed first overall at both events and received accolades from the judges who were both impressed and entertained by our enthusiastic presentation and overall teamwork.

Core Values

The core value portion of FIRST® stresses six philosophies of gracious professionalism, including discovery, innovation, impact, inclusion, teamwork, and fun. While we built and coded an autonomous robot that produced consistent and exemplary results, we also we learned to conduct meaningful research, work as a team, communicate with professionals in the community, recover and learn from failure, innovate new ideas to impact our community, and present our findings clearly and concisely. What started as a group of relative strangers brought together by their love of STEM, evolved into a group of friends dedicated to each other and to making a difference in their community through the FIRST® Core Values.

Please know that by supporting Team Crocs in Socks, you will be helping a group of driven students who are passionate about engineering, science, and math continue their journey in this FLL season. Our goal is to offset costs associated with the students’ trip to include registration fees, hotels, and transportation. We believe this will be a very engaging and impactful experience and we hope to share what we see and what we learn.