Team LCAT – La Crescenta Adventure Troop – a FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) LEGO team consisting seventh grade girls from the Girl Scout Cadette troop 3481, won first place Champion’s Award at the FIRST LEGO League Los Angeles Regional Championship Tournament in December, defeating over 470 other teams. This qualifies the team to compete among the top 108 international teams at the FLL World Championships in Houston, Texas on April 15-18.

This is the girls’ third season as an FLL team. The team has committed countless hours to build itself to the championship level including team members spending their summer making videos describing their techniques for robot design and programming, which they posted to their YouTube video channel “LCats FLL.” The videos have been viewed almost 15,000 times this season inspiring kids to explore STEM fields and showing that girls can excel in STEM.

To win the Champion’s Award they had to excel in four judged categories: robot design, robot performance, project and core values. For robot design, teams present the robot that they built and programmed using LEGO Mindstorm kits. In robot performance, the LCAT robot earned points by completing missions on a 4’x8’ competition table. For project team members completed a research project to solve a problem related to the community. The team was judged “excellent” in all categories but particularly excelled in core values because they functioned well as a team and by helping other teams.

The LCATS are now working hard on the goal to win an award at the World Championship tournament. They must raise $11,000 to help pay for the $1,000 registration fee and travel costs. For information regarding contributing to the goal, contact fundraising chair Christina Yen at (626) 710-0477 or email is aacmatrix@yahoo.com.