2021 FLL Tournament
Every year, Cupertino Robotics hosts an annual FLL tournament in order to expose elementary and middle school students to the field of Robotics and foster innovation and the core values of FIRST. Because of the global pandemic, Cupertino Robotics had to get creative in how they hosted the tournament. In order to stay safe and follow CDC guidelines, this year’s tournament was held on Hopin, a virtual event management software platform, rather than at Cupertino High School. Along with the typical FLL competition matches, there were other activities and games held in breakout rooms. Despite the challenges that, the overall event was a great success and all the students had an enjoyable time.
In the main room, the traditional FLL matches took place. Parents and members of Cupertino Robotics volunteered by judging the FLL teams in three different categories: their overall project, the robot design, and core values.
Since the thrill of an in-person competition is difficult to replicate virtually, the Cupertino Robotics Outreach team hosted various other activities in break-out rooms, such as a virtual escape room, Kahoot, Wikipedia races, and more, to keep participants engaged throughout the competition. Cupertino Robotics members Tiffany Wang and Allison Yu hosted the escape room activity through Google Forms. Allison explains, “Because the event was hosted on Hopin and we couldn't have multiple hosts conducting each group, Tiffany and I decided to make an escape room on google forms which had the questions and scenarios, allowing the participants to work independently.” The theme of the escape room was a mission to retrieve treasure from a sunken civilization. In order to succeed, participants had to solve riddles, piece together puzzles, and decipher coded messages. Sophomore Yash Aggarwal helped moderate the Kahoot and found creative ways to keep the Kahoot engaging for middle school students. He explains, “The way we did this for the Kahoot was by adding funny questions about random things like the avengers and we sprinkled them all throughout our Kahoot. We managed to get a few laughs from the FLL students which was what we were looking for and it made us happy.” Finally, Sophomore Naavya Gupta hosted the Wikipedia races, a game where participants start on the same Wikipedia page and click hyperlinks until they reach the destination page. In order to make the activity relevant to robotics, destination pages like “Mechanical Engineering” and “Servomotor” were chosen. The participants had fun and met new people while learning about key engineering terms and FIRST values.
Through these activities, Cupertino Robotics was able to overcome the challenge of keeping the competition engaging and recreate the excitement of in-person competitions for all the participants. Despite the pandemic, we were once again able to inspire the next generation of engineers in a memorable way.
