FLL 2016 Fuzzy Logic Team

[Technic Jim]

Hello all,

Firstly, I would like to apologise about the text wall - I got a bit carried away

I am writing here on behalf of a FLL (First Lego League-there website address is http://www.firstlegoleague.org/) team I am part of called Fuzzy Logic. For those of you who do not know what FLL is, it is a Lego Robotics competition for school children. There are four parts to winning the competition and they are as follow

1: Robot performance The robot you build has to be a Lego Mindstorms one (it doesn't matter what generation) and it will perform on a mat with various different challenges on. The more challenges you complete, the more points you get.

2: Robot Design This category is about how well built the robot is and what functions it has as well as how innovative it is

3: Core values How well you wok together as a team and with other teams

4: The project The project will be set around a pre decided topic which is decided by First, the people who run the FLL. This year the theme was trash and I will be talking about that later

All of these aspects will be individually judged and you will be given an overall score. If you are the highest in your region (for Fuzzy Logic this is the south West) you will go through to the nationals that are to be held in Loughborough this year. We won our regional area along with a team called Tech HEds (I don't know if they post here but if they do, Hello!). So that means that on 21st of February we will be heading up to Loughborough to compete head-to-head with the 39 other best teams in the UK. Whoever wins that will go through to the internationals that are held in America as a representative for the UK. So what is the meaning of the post, I hear you ask and this is it: We would like some help with our project.

Our project is called the Net Bag. It is a small, orange bag designed to replace the plastic grocery bags you get in shops. I'll explain it briefly here but there will (should!) be a PowerPoint explaining it more thoroughly attached to this post. EDIT: It turns out I can't upload a PowerPoit but if you do want to see it, PM me you email address and I will email it to you. The Net Bag uses less plastic than the normal one because it is a net and will be made from recycled plastic from the oceans. It is possible to make these, we have tried by shredding up, extruding and then weaving recycled plastic offcuts from our DT department at school. We came up with the idea because we looked at some plastic bag figures and realised how much we are drowning in plastic; we use 5 trillion plastic bags yearly for instance! We also looked at the 5p plastic bag charge and saw how that had created an 80% decrease in plastic bag usage at Tesco! However, the plastic vegetable bags are still free so people are stealing them (we have video evidence to prove this. The Net bag is a good alternative because safe for young children and very strong and long lasting along with other things. That basically sums up the Net bag but you should read the PowerPoint for more information. If you can't open it just tell me.

The bit we would like your help with is an online SurveyMonkey we would like you to fill in to gather customer research about the Net Bag. The address is https://www.surveymo...co.uk/r/netbags and it would be really helpful if you could fill it in and tell others about it so we can get more balanced results and good publicity. The survey is self explanatory but if you have any problems please contact me via PM or the comment.

Thank you for helping us and for reading that text wall but hopefully it will be worth it. If you have any ideas or suggestions please comment and leave any other feedback.

Thanks again, Jim and the rest of Fuzzy Logic

[Technic Jim]

I would just like to put a post here to say that as of today we have 56 replies to the survey which is great in helping us make our project as good as possible. So please, if you haven't completed the survey, it would be really helpful.

Thanks very much, Fuzzy Logic