Robotics FLL (First Lego League)
This initiative is part of the Fayette County Public Schools Gifted Program, providing advanced learning opportunities that challenge and inspire students through innovation, creativity, and hands-on exploration.
Our teams have been hard at work constructing the mission models for this year's FIRST LEGO League Unearthed Challenge! Students have been carefully assembling the various structures that will test our robot's capabilities on the competition mat.
The Unearthed season focuses on exploring what lies beneath the Earth's surface, and our mission models reflect this exciting theme. Students are building structures for missions that involve discovering and extracting resources, exploring underground environments, understanding geological formations, and learning about sustainable practices for working with Earth's hidden treasures. Each model requires precision and attention to detail to ensure accurate scoring during competition runs.
Once all the mission models are assembled and positioned correctly on our practice mats, we'll move into the robot design phase. Our teams will collaborate to build a sturdy, versatile robot capable of navigating between missions and using various attachments to complete different tasks.
After our robot builds are complete, the real fun begins with programming! Students will learn to code autonomous sequences that guide the robot through multiple missions in a single 2.5-minute run, strategizing which missions to attempt and in what order to maximize our score.
This hands-on process teaches our students valuable skills in engineering, problem-solving, and teamwork while exploring real-world challenges related to Earth's subsurface resources and geology!
Our teams recently took an exciting field trip to the Coon Creek Science Center in Adamsville, TN, to support our research for the FLL Unearthed Challenge! This hands-on experience was invaluable as we explored the research and problem-solving component of our robotics project.
At Coon Creek, students had the opportunity to dig for real fossils in the famous Cretaceous fossil beds, discovering ancient marine life that existed over 70 million years ago when West Tennessee was covered by a shallow sea. This firsthand experience of unearthing specimens gave our team a deeper understanding of paleontology, geological time, and the scientific methods used to study what lies beneath the Earth's surface.
The visit perfectly aligned with our Unearthed Challenge theme, helping students make real-world connections between the missions we're programming our robots to complete and the actual work scientists do to explore and understand Earth's subsurface. Our students asked thoughtful questions, collected data, and gathered insights that will inform our Innovation Project as we develop solutions to real problems related to discovering and preserving Earth's hidden resources.
This field trip has energized our teams and given us authentic context for our FLL season. We're excited to apply what we learned at Coon Creek to both our robot game strategy and our research presentation!
Our Gifted classes are thrilled to be creating a unique display for the Carl Perkins Festival of Trees in Somerville, TN—a Christmas tree that takes visitors on a journey through Earth's geological history! This educational tree directly connects to our FLL Unearthed Challenge research and celebrates the fascinating story of what lies beneath our planet's surface.
Students are creating handmade artifacts representing different geological time periods, from the Paleozoic (541 - 252 million years ago), Mesozoic (252 - 66 million years ago) - "Age of Dinosaurs", and Cenozoic (66 million years ago - present) - "Age of Mammals" Eras. These student-crafted ornaments will be carefully arranged on the tree in chronological order, with the oldest eras positioned at the bottom and progressing upward through time. At the very top of our tree, we'll showcase our current FLL research and Innovation Project, symbolizing how we're building upon millions of years of Earth's history.
This creative display allows our team to demonstrate what we've learned about paleontology, geological time scales, and the incredible discoveries that come from unearthing Earth's secrets. By presenting this information in such a visual and accessible format, we hope to spark curiosity in festival visitors about the layers of history beneath their feet and the importance of studying our planet's past to inform our future.
The tree serves as an authentic sharing of our students' knowledge, creativity, and deep dive into the Unearthed Challenge theme!
Precambrian Eon:
- Hadean
- Archean
- Proterozoic
Phanerozoic Eon:
- Paleozoic Era: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian
- Mesozoic Era: Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous
- Cenozoic Era: Paleogene, Neogene, Quaternary (present)
Historical Eras (AD/CE, Oldest to Present)
- Middle Ages / Early Medieval Period
- Renaissance
- Industrial Revolution
- Modern Era / Modern Period
- Contemporary Era / Contemporary Period
Our young engineers have been hard at work, and the excitement in the room is electric! Every mission model has been built and is ready for action on the competition mat — and now the real adventure begins. Our students are diving headfirst into programming their LEGO SPIKE Prime robots, learning to write and refine code that will guide their robots autonomously through each mission. Watch out, West Tennessee, our robotics teams will be making their way to the competition floor during the 2026 -2027 school year!
