The FIRST Lego League Challenge Kickoff was held at the Rochester Planetarium Sept 11th.

The event was exciting and well attended by teams and coaches from around the area. Several members of Team GRR attended to get the scoop on this year’s game. We were happy to talk to many new coaches about the Lego program and promoted our NXT Coaches Clinic. We met Matt Stark, an alumnus of Team 340 who was gathering information for a brand new FLL team he was heading up in Corning NY.

Bausch and Lomb asked us to help mentor their Lego League team, Team B.L.A.S.T. to teach them about NXT programming, help them with strategy and their project.

On Wednesday, September 22^nd three GRR team members and Mrs. Swift went to the Bausch and Lomb Headquarters in the city of Rochester from 6:00 until 8:00pm to help the team.

The kids had already decided which missions to attempt, so we helped them with fine-tuning some of the programming aspects of the robot.

They started looking into what sort of project to do, and decided to do a project concerning bionic eyes, since Bausch and Lomb deals with the eyes.

Good luck to Team B.L.A.S.T.

Continuing our ongoing effort to promote literacy, Greater Rochester Robotics team 340 helped Chili Pediatrics.

Team 340 collected and donated eight huge boxes of books. The books will be used in the waiting rooms and main lobby for visitors to read and enjoy. They were very thankful for our donation and interest in reading.

Churchville-Chili is definitely having good times including their first annual Celebrate Churchville-Chili.

Churchville invited all their sports teams to attend and host booths explaining about what they do in their teams.

With the superintendent, Churchville-Chili Central School District administration members, and other various sports teams and clubs, the FIRST Robotics Team 340 demonstrated their robot and talked about FIRST.

Many parents and kids were very interested in what FIRST had to offer.

On Thursday, September 23^rd, from 6:30 until 8:30pm Greater Rochester Robotics held an FLL Clinic in the Churchville-Chili High School Technology Wing.

This is the second year this clinic has been available to parents and coaches of FLL teams.

Eighteen people attended this event, and came from four different counties Monroe, Genesee, Ontario, and Onondaga.

The most interesting part of the night for visitors was learning NXT and finding out what the game is for this year.

The audience was highly interested in FLL and excited to tell their teams about what they learned.

Good Luck with the Body Forward Challenge.

On Saturday, September 18^th, Greater Rochester Robotics Team 340 held its second annual Golf Tournament at Salmon Creek Country Club from 9:45am until 3:00pm.

The weather was warm and sunny—a perfect day for golf! Fifty-three golfers attended this event, and interestingly, one of the GRR mentors in attendance won the 50/50 raffle.

Chuck Moone, who is also a mentor came in first place in the tournament. Everyone in attendance was very interested in FIRST Robotics. They wanted to go to other events like ours in the future.

Over all we were very pleased with the production of this year’s golf tournament and can’t wait until next year or even this spring to do it again.

Team 340 member’s work together to help out a fellow FIRST team student.

Robotics Team 340 collected bottles and cans to go towards a fund to help a 1511 student diagnosed with cancer. All of our proceeds will go towards this student’s condition and everyone from Team 340 wants to wish this student a smooth recovery. We just hope that our contribution will help out in any way possible.

The Girl Scouts of Western NY FIRST Lego Team, Hippie Pandas, kicked off a new season of the Body Forward Challenge.

The team was eager to start and went to the kick off at the Planetarium to get an overview of the game. They are meeting on Wednesdays at the CC tech wing and on Saturdays as the season progresses. This year’s project explores the field of Biomedical Engineering and they have decided to work on a project involving the blind. This year you will be able to spot the team as they will be wearing bright green, blue and orange tie dye tee shirts.