Nov 17, 2008: Los Altos Robotics FLL Competition is THIS COMING WEEKEND, Sun, Nov 23, from 12:30 pm to 6 pm at Blach Intermediate School which is located at 1120 Covington Rd, Los Altos, CA 94024.   Everyone is welcome to come watch 24 local area teams, with boys and girls ages 10 to 14 from grade school to high school, run their robots in this year's exciting and difficult CLIMATE CONNECTIONS challenge.   Here is the tournament schedule.

Oct 23, 2008: Los Altos Robotics FLL scrimmage is THIS WEEKEND, Sun, Oct 26, from 1pm to 5pm at Blach Intermediate School, 1120 Covington Rd in Los Altos. Everyone is welcome to come watch 24 local area teams, with boys and girls ages 10 to 14 from grade school to high school, run their robots in this year's exciting and difficult CLIMATE CONNECTIONS challenge.

Sep 23, 2008: We now have more participation requests than our capacity for Los Altos scrimmage and tournament. We encourage teams to continue to form as National registration ends on Sep 30th. The NCaFLL organizers will help teams find local tournaments and we support our local area teams with coaches training and mentors beyond our tournament capacity.

Sep 7, 2008: Coaches meeting/training was excellent and training material is posted.

Aug 27, 2008: Web site is open and we are going to have a great season with lots of robotics, learning and fun for all. So welcome aboard and lets get to it. You will find lots of great information about the FLL program including the calendar, introduction to the Los Altos Robotics group and information on starting your own team on our FLL page.

It is very helpful if at least one person from each family involved in FLL in the Los Altos area joins the Los Altos Robotics TigerBots email list. You can find out more about the list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TigerBots. Your email address will be kept private and not distributed outside of Los Altos Robotics board and coaches. To subscribe, simply send email to: TigerBots-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. If you decide to unsubscribe, email: TigerBots-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

Good luck. If you have any other questions feel free to contact me.

Michael Schuh MichaelLosAltosRobotics.Org, (650) 965-8037 (Home), or (650) 604-1460 (Work)

See what FLL is about in this video from the 2004 Los Altos local FLL tournament, No Limits. The second video is sights and sounds from the 2005 Northern California NCaFLL Ocean Odyssey state tournament:

• FIRST LEGO League is for fourth grade through 14 year olds. The fall season runs from Sep to Nov.
• Botball is for Junior High and High School students and takes place in the Winter and Spring. Los Altos Community team had a great 2008 season. See the fun here with videos from the California and National tournament.
• FIRST High School Robotics is for High School students and also takes place in the Winter and Spring.
• Our FIRST FLL regional affiliate, Playing At Learning , coordinates Northern California FLL with over 250 teams every year. In addition, they run other smaller robotics programs too such as FIRST Tech Challenge and JR. FLL.

If you would like to promote FLL in Northern California, please make a donation as a corporate sponsor or individual, to the NCaFLL coordinator, Playing At Learning, a 501c non-profit corporation.

UPDATE for FLL 2007: NCaFLL state robotics tournament Sat, Jan 12th was in Fremont. The Technostuds won an award for the alliance round. Chaotic Contraptions and Full Throttle A Corp placed in the top 20 in scoring, a great result in a very competitive tournament.

The 7th annual Los Altos FLL tournament was Sunday, Dec 2, 2007 at Blach School with 26 teams. Click here for results for Los Altos qualifier tournament. . Click here for the event schedule and click here for the 2007 one-page flyer and click here for the 2007 Tournament Announcements .

2006Congratulations to the LEGO Legends for solving the NanoQuest challenge and taking 1st place at the 2006 NCaFLL state tournament. There is a writeup in the Los Altos Town Crier. In addition, the Dogbots won the Alliance Award and the Bionic Builders were selected the best rookie team.

The Lego Legends also represented NCaFLL at the 2006 FIRST Robotics World Festival . The top teams from FLL, VEX, and High School challenges were honored to meet the president at the White House. The irony is that "meeting the president" was mentioned by one of the teams in our 2004 Los Altos FLL Video (above); however, at that time, it was a rumor that wasn't true - now it is true. Gee, you can build robots and learn how to predict the future too!

Results for the local 2006 Los Altos Robotics FIRST LEGO League tournament are available here. FLL includes both a robotics challenge AND a research project challenge. The first video below is an example of an excellent presentation from Small is Beautiful , the North Los Altos 1st place team.

The second video is the 2006 NCaFLL award presentation including the Lego Legends receiving 1st place performance and later the overall championship award. The fun of robotics is the journey. Getting an award for all your hard work is also exciting, but even if you don't get an award, you still have a great time building robots with your friends.

Results and team pictures are available here for the 2005 Northern California FLL State Competition. See the full writeup in the Los Altos Town Crier .

Watch this video of the amazing No Limits robot from the TigerBots when they won the 2004 NCaFLL state tournament. This is NOT an example of a typical FLL robot, and in fact is probably one of the more complex FLL robots ever created. However, it is great fun to watch.

The video on the right are other amazing No Limits robots from the FIRST Robotics World Festival that same year. The variety of robots here is impressive. These are all done with the older RCX Lego Mindstorm robotics kits (the yellow brick):

Los Altos Robotics was formed in 2004 to organize and promote robotics activities in Los Altos and surrounding areas. Los Altos Robotics board members have organized FLL robotics tournaments in Los Altos since 2001. This organization now contains a board of about 10 dedicated volunteers. If you want to volunteer, send one us an email and come to a board meeting. Meetings are open to the public. Click here to see the Los Altos Robotics board and a list of the upcoming board meetings.

For general questions, comments, or suggestions, please email WebmasterLosAltosRobotics.Org.

For registration questions, please visit the Participating in Los Altos Robotics FLL page first and then email MichaelLosAltosRobotics.Org or call Michael Schuh at (650) 965-8037 if you still have questions.

Currently, the Los Altos Robotics web site join and log in account is intended only for coordinators. If you are currently a member of the TigerBots email alias, you will receive the information you need in your email.

In the future, we will transition to the member facility here and will notify the TigerBots email list when this happens.