(Photo by Michael Yuen)
In the 15th Long Island FIRST Lego League (FLL) championship tournament at Longwood High School, the Jericho team called Diamond Cube made their way into the top four, punching their ticket into the FLL Open Invitational in West Virginia from July 12-14.
Ten students from different schools and ages across Long Island delivered strong cases to present themselves as unique, but united individuals. Together, they built world-class award-winning robots, demonstrating professional engineering process in hardware and software design as well as in project research.
Among those from Jericho who are on the team include eighth-grader Andrew Yuen, sixth-graders Aidan Yuen, Helena Zhang and Kyle Lee, fifth-graders Daniel Chen and Jack Li, as well as fourth-graders Leon Zhang, Christian Chan, Grace Li and Blake Wu.
“For Diamond Cube, this year’s success definitely set a good example of their FIRST spirit driving them to excel in STEM and other fields,” coach Jerry Li said. “But the values go far beyond, preparing them with solid foundation to get along well with the open-challenge society, unique and united.”
This year’s FLL challenge theme is “Into Orbit” on deep solar space exploration.
Led by coaches Li and Michael Yuen, the Jericho team spent six months crafting a unique compact robot using all Lego parts and EV3 controller/motors/sensors. To push the limit of completing all missions for a full score, the Diamond Cube squad took the peerless challenge to combine maximum-designed mechanics onto the minimum three attachments with strong and expandable structures.
Out of the 176 teams competing in the Long Island region, Diamond Cube is just one of four to advance to the nationals. The regional events are organized by School-Business Partnerships of Long Island with FIRST Long Island. The other three winning teams are the Sea Lions from Seaford (champion), Taco Brothers from Garden City and the Techno Queens, who are also from Jericho.
