A team of six 9 to 12 year olds designed and programmed a robot for entry into the First Lego League tournament for "Animal Allies 2016".  They achieved a score of 138 on the robot challenge, well ahead of the next team in the field of 19 high-school entries.  They were awarded the prize for the best robot performance


A video of their award winning run may be found here: bit.ly/BackstreetBuilders2016


Despite a wide lead (the next team only scored 89 points) on the challenge board, the Backstreet Builders were not selected to advance to the next round of the competition since their entries in the other components of the challenge were not strong enough.  Oddly the judges were unable to provide a ranked score for those other components, which could be considered unrealistic as an assessment method.


The team has now decided to advance to programming with the BBC micro:bit, Raspberry Pi, etc, and will also consider the IEEE robot challenges where the scoring is far more transparent.


The team wishes to express its sincere thanks to the IET Ottawa LN for their generous support, and to Kettlemans Bagels who provided much needed refreshment on the day of the tournament.



Frank Johnson.  Coach and IET LN member.