Ribbots Team Information

The Ribbots are a Robotics team from Cottage Grove, MN and are a part of FIRST® Lego® League Challenge. Our team is comprised of students in 4th-8th grade, high school mentors, and volunteer coaches. We are an independent team with nonprofit status through our fiscal sponsors, Hack Club.

The Ribbots had a successful rookie season (2022-2023). The team won the Core Value awards at their regional competition. In addition, the team qualified to the MN State Championships where they won the innovation project model award. The team was invited to compete in the 2023 Western Edge Invitational in Long Beach California along with 80 teams from around the world. The team competed well and gained significant experience.

The team continued it's success in the 2023-2024 season. The Ribbots won the Champions Award (1st place) and Top Robot Game Performance Score at the Woodbury Regional, which earned them an automatic berth to the 2024 MN State Championships. At the MN State Championships, they placed 11th for their robot game score. The received callbacks (top 7 teams) for programming, creative innovation presentation, and for their innovation project idea. They received a Judges' award for recognizing their impacts and logistical details in their innovation project and robot design presentations. Based on their performance results, they were invited to represent Minnesota at the American Robotics Open Invitational in New Jersey, along with 60 other high-performance teams from across the US. The Ribbots were partnered with a team from Pennsylvania as an alliance and their alliance was the runner up (finalist) for winning the Lightning Round robotics game.

Team Motto from Wizard of Oz: "It's Not Where You Go. It's Who You Meet Along the Way."

Walker Art Museum

Ribbots took a field trip to tour the art gardens for inspiration for the upcoming season

About FIRST® Lego® League

FIRST® is a robotics program focused on the Core Values of innovation, impact, fun, discovery, teamwork, and inclusion. During the season, the students design, build, and program a robot that competes on a game table to score points by completing various missions. The students also complete and present an innovation project where they identify a real-world problem and develop a solution.

MN State Tournament (2023)

Western Edge Alliance with Teams from MN, Switzerland, and New Jersey

Team Building at an Escape Room

Team Pit Table for the 2023 Regionals

MN State Championships (2024)

MN State Robot Game

AROC Invitational

AROC Lightning Round Finalist

2023-2024 Masterpiece Season

Robot Game and Design:

The Ribbots have built a new box design robot with 4 attachment spots for the Masterpiece season. They have named the robot the "Tadpole." The team used the early season to learn some new coding blocks and will rely on the gyro sensor for turns this season along with a block to control the sharpness of their turns. This season the goal is to rely on more passive attachments to free up motors, allowing them to combine multiple missions into one run.

Innovation Project:

The Ribbots were tasked with the following innovation project: "How can you use technology and the arts to help engage others or increase participation in what you love to do? "

The Ribbots are focused on increasing participation in hobbies for kids with special needs. The specific project they selected as a team is to increase participation in Lego League for students with severe autism. They are exploring and creating visual tools that would allow the students to communicate and fully engage in practices. Their goal is to start a new Explore team for 3rd and 4th grade students at a local school with students from their autism program. They will take everything they learned to create a How-To Guide for the FLL community to guide more coaches, teachers, and parents to start up additional teams for students with autism.