Well our school year is almost over, there are only 10 mores days left! But work on our program is not over! This week the Elementary Lego Robotics team we are mentoring has their end of the year competition. In the past couple of months we have participated in a lot of events, Mini Maker Faire, Engineering Expos, and the NASA expo.

We are reviewing applications for next years students and will begin interviews soon.

We have weekly meetings and training programs scheduled for our Summer break as well.

This week we mailed all of the Kickstarter rewards to you, our great supporters! So check your mail box, if you sent us your address your rewards are in the mail and will be arriving soon.

Our year was a success and we thank you again for your support!

We survived! It was a long, tiring, fun-filled three days. We won some matches, lost a few, made some new friends, and won an award!

During the seeding matches at one point we were ranked as high as second, but losing our last two matches dropped us to 12th place with a 6-3 record.

We were picked pretty quickly for the alliance finals but were eliminated in the quarter finals, 0-2. Overall we finished in 11th place.

Our team and the robot we built, "Queen Hana's Revenge", won the award for quality. This award is one of the most difficult awards to win.

Thanks again for all the support!

The FIRST Robotics Long Beach Regional Competition is fast approaching.

We hope you will be able to come out, meet us, and watch us in some matches.

The location and schedule is below:

LONG BEACH ARENA

300 Ocean Blvd, Long Beach, CA 90802

March 15 (10:00am-4:30pm) Practice Rounds

March 16 (9:30am- 5:00pm) Seeding Matches

March 17 (1:30pm-12:15) Seeding matches; Finals matches begin at 1:30pm

You are welcome to come visit us in the pit area, please stop by and introduce yourself and see what you helped build. We will also have a large group of students in the stands, look for the pink Team 696 t-shirts! Join us and help cheer for our team. We are looking forward to meeting you.

This last weekend we were guests at South Pasadena Middle School's "Destination ImagiNation event".

Several local home inventors also attended but I think the kids all loved Reptar best, our 2011 robot.

The kids ranged from grades 1st thru 8th. Based on the questions they were asking our students, I think it's safe to say there are going to be a lot of great engineers in the future!