Today was a big day for the members of our two Jr. FLL teams, the Super Sonic Seniors and the Ultimate Elderlies. The coaches and kids, along with family and friends, hopped into cars, and drove from Los Angeles to Carlsbad, CA for the largest Jr. FLL Expo in the world. Over 100 Jr. FLL teams will attend one of four Expo sessions this weekend in which they share their research projects and posters with other teams and judges from the Legoland staff.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this year’s Jr. FLL research theme is “Super Seniors”, involving an interview with a senior citizen, and research into some change that the senior noticed in her lifetime. The Super Sonic Seniors put together a poster detailing the history and development of television and built a model of a television containing a rotating stage with two scenes. Placing the TV “remote” in front of a distance sensor in the model triggers the rotation of the stage, which changes the content and “channel” being shown on the television. The Ultimate Elderlies researched the evolution of long distance communication, doing detailed research on the Pony Express, the telegraph, cell phones and emails as successive improvements in mankind’s ability to communicate. Their LEGO model contained Lego renditions of each of these modes of communication, including a motor-driven telegraph that made a very realistic clicking sound, and a scene of a LEGO driver using his cell phone in a car, only to be pulled over by a policeman.