Foley Freeze Hosts FLL Qualifier at BFC

By Maddy Kubacki

While the school usually only has one robot running the halls, on November 20th, we had 18 more robots showing their skills in the Bishop Foley gym. Back in the Fall of ’21, The Foley Freeze hosted their 3rd annual FIRST LEGOⓇ League Challenge (FLL), for upper elementary school students. Like FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), the FLL games also have themes and this season’s game was Cargo Connect℠.

The Foley Freeze held their first FLL Challenge at Bishop Foley back in 2019, so it was a wonderful experience to host another one this year again! A few days before the tournament, Foley Freeze team members worked together to help build the LEGOⓇ game pieces. It was a great time for the team members to be here at school, building the pieces. This gave everyone a chance to get to know each other and spend time together!

“I thought it was a fun experience. I think that it was a good opportunity for service hours for Foley.” Jacob Pasharikovski, a sophomore field resetter mentioned, “The best part was seeing what strategies and codes the bots were using to move around the field.”

These types of events are great experiences for the younger ages in the FIRST progression of programs to have a look into events like FIRST Tech Challenge and eventually FRC in high school.

In FLL, teams work together to design and build a LEGOⓇ robot and then program it to autonomously complete a series of missions to score points in a 2.5-minute robot game. Each team has 12 weeks to build and program their robot then compete in different competitions at different high schools. I think it’s wonderful to have these teams at these younger ages because it teaches them great teamwork skills and what it means to be part of a team. At the competitions, you could see each of the teams working hard and fast to get the most points possible in a short amount of time.