[Nick Lawrence]

FLL has brought me right up through the ranks of FIRST, all the way to FRC.

We here at 1503 have been working on our outreach programs, and the centerfold of them is having FLL at our feeder schools. I've written letters to the Ministry of Education for years, along with our schoolboard, to get Lego kits at all of our elementary schools under their jurisdiction. Persistence pays off, our schoolboard has donated Lego NXT Mindstorms kits to every elementary school in their area. Other boards are looking to do the same.

Anyways, we hook schools by explaining the values of FIRST, what FLL is all about, and several demonstrations of FIRST on all competition levels. Presentations are obviously geared more towards grade 6-8s, so nothing too technical. But kids are attracted to big, shiny robots that do cool things.

Make sure you demonstrate a FLL robot or two, as the kids would like to know what they're getting into. Sure they might see this big FRC robot, but really the focus should be on FLL. We show FRC as "this is what FLL leads to, especially if you go to our school." So it's a win win for our school, and our team.

When their season rolls around, make sure you have a couple FRC students on hand who are experienced with FLL to teach them things like how to program their robot, how to build simple mechanisms, etc. I will be mentoring 4 teams this year, because I'm the only one on my team who has gone through the continuum. Mind you, there will be other teammates at the schools I'll be helping too. Winging it alone is generally a bad thing.

Any more questions? PM me. Happy to help!

-Nick