Over the past FLL season, seven Neutrinos mentored four Ames Middle School FLL teams. Mentors started meeting with the teams midway through their season. In this volunteering opportunity, we worked hard to give the teams guidance and advice about programming, robot design, the project, presentation, and core values. The teams were better prepared for their competition this year, and so three teams won an award and one team qualified for the Iowa State Championships. This program took our team’s outreach to the next level because prior to this fall, our team had not mentored FLL teams this closely. With this program, we were able to work with them more often and more in depth. About forty students in FLL were impacted, and we volunteered for a total of about 113 hours. The mentoring program concluded with us attending their regional competition at Maxwell-Collins.

On Saturday, our team will build five to ten Mission Model kits for the First Lego League competitions at Iowa State. Through this activity, our team will help out the FLL program that inspires the next generation of scientists and engineers.