Last week, the Lazer Robotics, an award-winning, Newton-based FIRST LEGO League (FLL) team, completed its multi-year run in FLL by winning of the League’s most prestigious honors – FLL’s Coopertition Award – at the 2023 FLL Open Invitational in Marrakesh, Morocco.
Coopertition is a key part of the vision of FLL:“Coopertition® produces innovation. Coopertition is displaying unqualified kindness and respect in the face of fierce competition. … [T]eams can and should help and cooperate with each other even as they compete. …Coopertition means competing always, but assisting and enabling others when you can.”
Team Lazer Robotics was founded in 2017 by three 3rd graders from Countryside Elementary School and grew to five members this year. Along the way, it has won FLL’s Champion Award, Robot Performance Award, and Robot Design Award at qualifying meets and State Championships.
At the Massachusetts State Championship hosted at WPI last December, Lazer Robotics won the second-place Champion Award, which opened the door for the team to be invited to the Morocco FLL Open Invitational, May 18-21, a first-time-ever event bringing the top FLL teams worldwide – 68 teams from over 50 countries.
At the Morocco event, the Lazer Robotics’ won the Coopertition Award in recognition of its kindness, respect, and helpfulness to other FLL teams. For example:
- Lazer Robotics has provided remote mentorship to the Block Pythons – an FLL team in Rwanda – since the beginning of this year.
- The team has shared its design ideas and game strategies worldwide via YouTube. More than half of the teams at the Morocco Invitational — including team Robotic Engineers from Brazil, which won the highest award – told Lazer Robotics that they had benefitted from these videos.
- Lazer Robotics has collected more than $14,000 worth of FLL robot parts — donated by teams across the U.S. that have upgraded their set up or aged out of FLL — and distributed these donated parts to teams in Rwanda,, Nigeria, and two public schools in Morocco.
Ron Gong, coach of the Lazer Robotics, said: “The Cooperitition Award is a perfect reflection of this team’s FLL core values and the best way to wrap up their FLL journey. The Morocco event was more than a robotics competition. It was about knowledge sharing and cultural exchange among more than 1000 participants from all over the world. Although our robot was not having a great day, interacting with other teams has been the best part of their experience. Sharing snacks from their home countries. Demonstrating their sports, instruments, and traditional clothes. Our team’s custom-designed buttons were very popular, showing a robot holding an American flag and various country’s flags. Our team taught many how to throw a football and play football games.”
Now that the team members have aged-out of FLL, next year they will move up to the next FIRST league, FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC). They have been mentored by an outstanding FTC team — Wolfpack Machina from Waring School in Beverly, MA.
The Lazer Robotics team wants to thank The Village Bank for providing financial sponsorship for part of the costs of attending the Open Invitational in Morocco.
