We are Lil’ Bomb Squad a FIRST Lego League team ran out of Pinkston Middle School in Mountain Home, Arkansas. We are made up of 1 adult mentor, 3 high school mentors, and 4 6th-grade students. Our team was created by one of our high school mentors, Olivia, who has been mentoring for 3 years now. With the help of our adult mentor Mrs.Davis, our team came to be as Lil’ Bomb Squad being mentored by our high school students who are on Bomb Squad (an FRC Team). Our team’s goal is to encourage more students to begin exploring where they can go in STEM from a young age and begin to rebuild FIRST and STEM pathways in our community. Students that go through our program not only become strategic thinkers and problem solvers but also team players, confident speakers, and so much more. We work on many different things on the team such as building a robot, programming our robot, driving our robot, solving a problem for our project, building our project, and even making team building activities for our team. This year our project was called the Lil’ Energy Unit which was a planter box that would hold plants and have solar panels on the side to collect energy from both the solar panels and the pants in the box and store the energy collected in a battery that is also stored in the box. The box would be small enough to fit into a standard window sill or even on a shelf or in a mobile home or trailer. Our season started back in September and continued through meeting two days a week while we learned all the different areas of FIRST as well as learning how to work as a team. We then went to our first competition in Searcy, Arkansas in December where we won the Robot Design Award as well as qualifying for the Arkansas State Championship in January. We then continued to further our research in our project and we even made a business plan rough draft for our project. At the State Championship, we won the Rising All-Star award and qualified for the Asia Pacific Open Championship in June and July in Sydney, Australia. Our next steps to get ready for the Championship will be presenting to our community members and continuing work on our robot. Our students have been working hard to get the word out about our team and continue to encourage more students to get excited about STEM and robotics in hopes of getting more support from our community. However, we need your help.
