North NJ FLL

Welcome to the 2020-2021 FLL Season for the Northern NJ Region.FLL introduce younger students to real-world engineering challenges through LEGO robotics. FLL teams, guided by their imaginations and adult coaches, discover exciting career possibilities and, through the process, learn to make positive contributions to society.

FLL has rebranded to showcase it’s three robotic programs for students. FIRST LEGO League CHALLENGE is for 4th through 8th graders (9-14 years old) and FIRST LEGO League EXPLORE (formally FLLJr.), for K through 3rd grade students (6-9 years old) and now FIRST LEGO League DISCOVERY for pre-school students (4-6 years old). You can obtain information about both programs at the following website: www.firstinspires.org. Just select FIRST LEGO League under Programs and the About. It will give you information about the program and the steps to start a team. Most teams are school based, but there are home school, organizational, community and neighborhood teams as well. All types of teams are welcome to join and participate.

Teams are structured in a variety of different ways; some are clubs or after-school programs that meet year-round, while others are formed by parents, community organizations, or youth groups. For this and other reasons, we do not match individual children with pre-existing teams. Also, for privacy reasons, we are not able to share lists of team contact information.

There are 2 regions for FLL in the state of New Jersey. Each region is supervised separately and teams CANNOT cross regions to participate in events. Route 195 is roughly the demarcation line between the North and South regions.

In the North region, we are not sure if there will be any practice events this year due to the difficuties in obtaining locations and people to run these events for us. Teams will be informed if this chages. The Qualifying events this will be held in Mid January 2021, with the winners advancing to the Regional Championship which is scheduled for sometime in March 2021.

There will be enough spaces in the qualifying events to handle all registered teams. Registration is now open for the North NJ Region and this will close once we have reached the limit of Qualifying event capacity. This typically occurs at the beginning of October each year. Registration for qualifying events will be held starting in mid to late November. Exact dates will be sent to all registered teams in the fall.

The registration process will allow teams to select two events to attend. As events fill up, they will be taken off the list as a possible selection. Usually teams will be able to attend their first choice, however there might be the possibility that an event fills up as multiple teams are selecting it at the same time and in this case the team’s second choice will be used.

Due to on-going issues with the COVID virus, we are not sure exactly what format will be used for competitions. We are preparing various scenarios from 1 being the same as we have done in the past to 5 where there is a lockdown like we have seen these end of this previous school year. We suspect that things will fall someplace in between these two extremes and we will make teams aware of the options that have been put in pace once schools reopen in the fall.

Also LEGO has introduced a new kit called SPIKE Prime which can also be used by FLL CHALLENGE teams to program their robot this year. For details of this new kit got to the LEGO Education website Details about registration for this year’s event will be sent to teams in the fall with links on this site. Please check your e-mail blasts from FIRST and from our region as they will contain valuable information for your team.