It probably took them a little longer to craft a heartfealt welcome letter.

- jealous in minneapolis

you will have to let us know if you hear back from LEGO. J is right... no news is good news.

Just my opinion, but I would be very surprised if they "announce winners." If the 'winners' are known publically, then you can be sure they will be bombarded by people wanting information and trying to scope out any clue they can. The NXT non-disclosure agreement must be pretty tight and designed to keep the public release of information under LEGO control.

If so, I've seen you guys at regionals and state the last couple years. I used to coach the Sunny Hollow team and you guys are some serious competition!

Serious congratulations to you all. Good luck in the Netherlands - we're rooting for you.

Oh, and please take some pictures and post them here. :) We'd love hear more about what the FLL world open is like. You can contact me by clicking here if you need any help with creating an account or posting.

We've been edged out the last three years by them damned homeschool kids =P. We have however, won more team awards then them, just not the ones that send us to nationals. I must admit though, this year the BotZealots are absolutly AMAZING, their robot is perfect, even though they can't give a presentation for their lives. They scored a 63/100 out of that, but still somehow made it to Atlanta. We were told by Fred Rose however (this isn't something that is standard procedure), that if the BotZealots would have had a worse bot score, we would be going to nationals, because all around we were a better team, but their robot score just blew us out of the running.

I remember you guys. You have a really good team. Are you guys staying together for next year?

Yeah, the BotZealots robot was very cool this year. I'm always impressed with bots that can run a perfect trial. I would have to agree with you in regards to their presentations--a bit of a yawner. I've seen so many other more creative and entertaining presentations.

When are Nationals?

We cannot really stay together, three of us are entering high school, and the high school Lego compitition is just meh. I'm not sure when nationals are since we are going to world championships on May 3rd in Eindhoven.

Good luck at World!

The 2006 FLL World Festival, the officially sanctioned FLL international tournament, was held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 27th-29th. Eighty-one teams from around the globe competed in the Georgia Dome. The other teams voted to give the BotZealots a "Gracious Professionalism" award. The World Festival judges deemed them worthy of the third place "Director's Award" for excellence in all categories, which means they are the third best FLL team in the world.

A team doesn't win the Minnesota State Tournament three times in a row and earn the third place Director's Award at the World Festival with a mediocre research presentation.

The BotZealots' consistent level of success could not have happened without outstanding performance in all aspects of the competition.

Dude, Tha Qru rocks! You had those homeschool kids worried - I could see it, I swear ;) I still can't believe the technical proficiency that has become the baseline standard for so many teams in Minnesota. I'm curious how we compare with the rest of the country.

Can you post an article about your latest bot revisions? I'd love to hear more about the team and robot that are representing us Minnesotans at the world championships. Heck, if you're up for it, you guys should blog your trip to Eindhoven here. I know there're a lot of readers that would love to follow that.

Yeah, I can get some pics of our new bot, we had to pretty much dumb down our old one because the tech judges didn't get our programing and bot style. They didn't understand that being able to run a bot using no time, touch, light, or rotation sensors is something to be marveled at. The judges at regionals got what we were trying to do, but we got a crappy score at state because of the difficult room to present in, and because of the senile judge. He gave us a bad score because he couldn't understand how our bot worked.

As for how we compare to other states, we blow them out of the water, we are consistantly the best teams in the nation, and hopefull our team can prove, in the world.

I've noticed the 'more sensors is better' approach to tech judging as well. Typically the top 3-5 bots are similarly capable and similarly 'well designed' and 'well programmed', but determining the scores comes down to a team's ability to convince the judges that their design methodology is superior.

I recall years where the team I coached were the top scorers, but 2nd or 3rd in judging, with notes such as "you could use a rotation sensor to determine distance". Every choice you make means some other option was not taken. It's all about having the confidence to explain what the different options were, why the option you chose is superior, and why it's consistent with your design goals. It's almost like you have to anticipate the presumptions that the judges have (especially if you know what other bots they have seen prior to you) and carefully walk them through the validity of your own design.

The other difficulty is that software design and mechanical design are judged seperately by different judges and explained by different team members. We've always had a lot of involvment from every member on both sides of the project and they sometimes don't get an opportunity to defend the parts that they may know best because they are at the other table.

With the seperate judging scenario, you often get into a situation where your software is extremely simple because your mechanics are very smartly designed... or your mechanics are very simple due to the elegance of your software. Simplicity is an asset to these events, but you really need your wits about you to explain the benefits of your design when another team has a cool looking Rube Goldberg robot with a hundred sensors and moving parts.

Agreed, I'm not sure people would understand how hard it is to be pushing the envelope in the programming region, we tried things on our bot this year that no team that we have seen has tried. We also implemented an extremely difficult type of programming, that as hard as we may h ave tried, we just could not get the judges to understand.