Support 5th grade girls creating an ingenious solution for flash floods
http://highlightersFLL.wordpress.com
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Our robotics team, The Highlighters, made up of seven 5th grade girls, will be competing in the FIRST ®LEGO® LEAGUE invitational tournament this Saturday. In addition to designing and programming a robot made out of Legos to complete missions on a game field, we were asked to design an innovative solution to a real world problem with this year’s theme NATURE’S FURY®.
We chose to focus on Flash Flooding as our topic of study after we saw the terrible flooding that occurred in Colorado shortly after the challenge began this Fall. Soon after that, Austin was hit with heavy rains and we saw the effects of flooding and the unfortunate tragedies from flash floods right in our own town.
Despite the current signs and barricades used to warn us of flooded roads, Central Texas still leads the nation in flood related deaths and 75% are vehicle-related at low water crossings. This inspired us to design an automatic flood warning system that would be a great improvement over existing signs and barricades.
We took first place in the research portion of the FLL® competition at our Qualifier in December. We recently learned to make blogs in school so in order to get our ideas out to the community and get feedback that may improve our design, the team has created a blog describing our invention, the Flash FLare FLood FLoat (FL4).
We would be very grateful if you would take a few minutes to look over our blog and leave a comment with feedback on our ideas and design. The judges really like to see that the teams have reached out to the community. Our goal is to have 100 comments by Friday night to print and show the judges on Saturday morning so feel free to forward this to anyone you think may like to help us.