Circuit Squirrels - FLL Team 60911

About Us

The Circuit Squirrels

We are a FIRST LEGO League Team from Newport News, Virginia. We got started in 2023 and just concluded our second FLL Challenge season. It has been an amazing journey of learning, building, and competing with our LEGO robots! This year, we even went to the World Festival in Houston, Texas, which was SUPER AWESOME!!!

About FLL

FIRST LEGO League (FLL) is an awesome program where kids like us (ages 9-14 in Challenge) design, build, and program LEGO robots to solve real-world challenges! We also work on an Innovation Project to come up with cool solutions to problems in our community.

It's all about teamwork, learning, and having tons of fun with science and technology!

Meet Our Awesome Robot!

"Ozzy De Oysta"

We have a 2-wheel drive robot.

It uses a forklift to complete following missions:

Shark
Coral Tree
Coral Buds
Scuba Diver
Coral Reef
Artificial Habitat
Raise the Mast
Change shipping Lanes
Send over the Submersible
Seabed Sample
Angler Fish

It has special attachments to:

raise the Coral Tree
push in the Coral Buds
lift the Artificial Habitat
lift the Coral Reef

It has a flexible bumper to move the Angler Fish.
It uses a peg to pull the Unknown Creature.
We have two push buttons to lower and raise the forklift if needed.

Our Innovation Project

This Year's Challenge: SUBMERGED

Our team, the Circuit Squirrels, is tackling the challenge of oyster restoration in the Chesapeake Bay. Oysters are super important for the health of our bay, but they are in danger because of pollution and habitat loss. We've been researching, brainstorming, and developing an innovative solution to bring back our oysters.

We want to help by:

Encouraging people to “adopt” oysters
Educating people to be mindful about our oysters
Building better artificial oyster reefs

Our Solution Idea: "SCORBS"

S.C.O.R.B.s (swiss cheese oyster reef blocks) are artificial oyster reef blocks that we designed to help the regrowth of oysters in our area.
We spoke to two marine biologists (from CNU and VIMS) who helped give us tips and inspire us to make these. Since oysters grow in tall stacks we wanted something that’ll match the height oysters in any size. Taking inspiration from Lego we designed adjustable growth blocks that can match any size and shape with because of two pegs on the top of the blocks that will connect to other blocks just like Lego. We wanted to replicate some of the characteristics of real oyster reefs so we put holes into our blocks because in real reefs animals live and hide from predators in those holes. (Swiss cheese because of its holes.)
If we put this into the water it should help the ecosystem just as a real reef should.