Happy Accidents — a community-organized middle-school robotics and innovation team from Siloam Springs — won the 2024 Arkansas State FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Championship and will be representing Arkansas at the 2024 World Festival in Houston, TX from April 17–20.
Happy Accidents started the competitive season in December at the NWA Qualifiers where they won 1st place out of nineteen teams and advanced (along with ten of those teams) to the State championship. Only the top 32 teams across Arkansas are able to advance to the State championship, which is hosted every January by the University of Arkansas.
The team is very grateful for the support they’ve received this year from John Brown University — which provides meeting spaces and some of the robot parts — and the Siloam Springs Chamber of Commerce — which has provided funding support and access to the downtown maker space.
In FLL competitions, the 9–14-year-old team members compete in four main areas: a 2.5-minute autonomous robot game; describing the innovated aspects of their physical and software robot design; presenting their solution to a real-world problem that they have identified and researched; and showing how they’ve exhibited the FIRST core values of respectfully working together as a team to discover new skills and ideas, use creativity and persistence to solve problems, and have a positive impact on their world.
For their innovation project, Happy Accidents presented Staff Masters, a board game they are developing — with feedback from professional game designers and musicians as well as community play-testers — that is designed to help people of all ages learn how to read music. Their robot uses modular, drop-on attachments that are each designed to solve multiple challenges on the robot game and is programmed with object-oriented, multi-threaded Python code they designed to consistently drive around the game board using a gyroscope to stay on track and light sensors to detect lines/locations on the board.
The team enjoys participating in competitions and meeting new teams and was thrilled to win State (this was one of the goals they set at the beginning of the school year). Beatrice Posey, a team member in her 3rd year described “the Arkansas State competition [as] fun, energetic, and amazing all at once; my favorite things at State were meeting new people and cheering on the team during robot runs”. Paxton Weathers, a team member in his 5th and final year of FLL found it “incredible to see so many creative and innovative solutions to the robot game missions; I also loved seeing how other teams took this year’s project theme and how they found outstanding solutions to difficult problems.” The team secretly nominated coach Dave Ellcey for a coach/mentor award at the State championship and it was a surprise to him when he won. The team (and coaches) are thrilled to use the experienced they gained last year at a smaller international competition as they now advance to World Festival.
FIRST’s World Festival includes 4 different leagues all competing in Houston at the same time; FLL — where Happy Accidents competes — is the second level and students up to age 18 can compete at the higher levels. FIRST expects 50,000 people to attend the festival this year, with hundreds of teams coming from around the world.
The team is working diligently to make significant improvements to their robot and board game projects so they can be competitive at the highest level. They are also raising funds to cover the roughly $14,000 needed to participate in the event (for registration, travel, lodging, food, etc.).