Bricks For Brains Blog

Whew! What a weekend :-)
The team is back home again, with quite a story to tell. We arrived at LEGOLAND a total underdog. A first-year team nobody had heard of. We flew in under radar and took 2nd place right under their noses! I'm very proud of my team. I can't go into too much detail but here's the rough account of the day...

We arrived Saturday morning at the park early and took some time to practice the presentation script (Dane, what's your next line?) After entering the park we found our pit attendant and he showed us to our table. We set up base camp and waited for our very short turn at the practice table. After that the kids went before the judges with their robot and presentation. Alan, Eric and I were a bit surprised that we couldn't so much as watch them. After what was apparently a good presentation (it's so hard to get an accurate story out of a 10 year old) we had lunch and saw a bit of the park. Then it was zero hour, time for the mission challenge. After a somewhat disappointing first run we were still in 18th place and really happy about it. Top half was good for us! Then came the second run, and it was picture perfect. We scored 341 points and found ourselves in second place! Not only that but only 5 points behind the leader and well ahead of third place. The third run went alright, but the atom challenge proved difficult. After the last table challenge we loaded all the stuff back in the van and saw some more of the park while we waited for the awards presentation. Not knowing how the scoring was done we went in to the awards ceremony with no expectations at all. We knew we did good at the table, but didn't know how that factored in to the awards. When it got down to just 4 trophies left it wasn't looking too good but then came the award for second place for robot performance and we heard the words “I am told this year’s team is a first year team, first time they’ve done it,(oohs and ahs were heard) so it’s always impressive to see a first year team do so well in performance. And they seem to be doing particularly well considering they have bricks for brains”. We went berserk! They took the stage and accepted their trophy with wide grins. I was smiling the rest of the day, very proud of them. Check out the pictures from the day on the gallery page.