Unearthed Bentonville FLL Qualifier

The time has come for our FIRST Lego League teams to show off their innovation projects and robot in the Unearthed Qualifier! This year we had five FLL teams compete at the Bentonville Qualifier: Team 39705 Gator-Rads, Team 66277 Apex Predators, Team 66278 Electric Technics, Team 68496 Divas, and Team 72459 Croco-Cools!

Our five teams rotated through judging for both their innovation projects and robot design as well as 5 robot matches. The coaches were sure they had double checked all the rules updates and understood all them all, but just like last year, we miss understood one rule! Not to fear though, our students created plans to solve this problem. Between matches, students signed up for practice tables to make sure their robots came all the way back inside home base to avoid the touch penalties. Super proud of our students for their quick thinking and perseverance!

Some of our teams also learned small lessons for future events like one team who misplaced half of their attachments before one of their last matches. We were able to make an announcement and find one of the three missing attachments, but the students had to use their engineering notebooks to recreate the other two. Another team forgot to charge their robot in between matches, and had to do an emergency battery pack transplant.

At the end of the day, awards were handed out and the list of teams advancing to the next level of competition were announced. Mentor Max won the Coach/Mentor award, and Team 66277 Apex Predators, Team 68496 Divas, and Team 72459 Croco-Cools will be go to the Arkansas State Championship Tournament in January!