Our second day at the Estonia Open International Competition didn’t go the way as we planned. Let’s just say on our first run everything failed. The reason was because of the fact that we didn’t have time to set up everything and our big attachment didn’t go fully to the end. After the first run we went to the judging room for project and core values presentations, which went really good. The judges really enjoyed our presentation I believe.
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Our second run was better, with a score of 70 points, which in our opinion knew that we could do better. Everything is now depended on our last robot run. 

​Day 5
Today we unpacked our robot to get ready for the competition tomorrow. Before we left we broke everything into small pieces and put them in a hard cased suitcase with lots and lots of packing peanuts.
 
Turns out that wasn’t enough, because when we opened the hard suitcase most of the attachments were broken into smaller parts. Luckily I remembered how some things went so we fixed the broken attachment with the help of others.
 
A new thing I learned today also was that Fanta the orange soda drink was actually from Europe. So that was pretty cool.

Finland Trip
We went to Finland today. There I learned a lot of things. Two things I learned there while I was in the tour bus were, Finland’s two official languages are Finnish and Swedish so if you get caught by a Swedish police officer and if you don’t speak Swedish the police officer doesn’t have the rights to arrest you. Think of it as a get out of jail card if you don’t understand. However, most police officers know both languages.
The other thing I learned was how most Finnish people are smart. How do they do this? The answer is their motto: Less is more. Finland’s school end their schools early, give less homework and let kids play longer outside. Finland schools believe that kids should just be kids and let them have some fun while it lasts. This lets them be more creative.
For lunch our coach wanted us to eat something that wasn’t regular so I ate a reindeer burger. It was technically just a regular burger with reindeer meat. To be honest it was no different from a regular burger. I enjoyed the trip to Finland, so if are near Finland I would definitely recommend Finland.

We went to the Tallinn Old Town Days Festival, where we saw two parades, the first one was a Church Procession and the other one was a regular parade. 

We explored cool grocery store technology that lets you scan all your grocery items as you go and then just walk out the store. Then we bought wooden medieval style swords and had sword battles next to the ancient medieval walls. We ended the day with a beat-boxing singalong! Way to go for teamwork!

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We left the Vancouver airport for an overnight flight that stopped in Frankfurt. Unfortunately our flight to Frankfurt was delayed more than one hour, which means we missed the flight to Estonia from Frankfurt.  

In Frankfurt we waited for our next flight to Estonia for about 7 hours. Luckily they gave us vouchers for food which made everything go a bit better since we got to eat! We looked at shops and got a bit of sleep.

Finally, we arrived in Tallinn at about 1am in the morning. A big taxi took us to the house where we would stay which is in a beautiful neighbourhood with lots of medieval architecture (the old part of Tallinn). The house is beautiful and very nice! 

​Earlier this week we attended Brick Can, which is an amazing exhibition of LEGO creations by people from around the world, to present our FIRST LEGO League robot game to the public. 
 
For the majority of the day we worked on our robot game, although at some points we went around to look at some of the other amazing exhibits. I can remember vividly a LEGO ship built to come up out of water mechanically. It was titled the ‘Durmstrang Ship’ from Harry Potter. Some of the builds there, including this one, were amazing. I would definitely recommend it to any LEGO enthusiast.
 
Our team would like to thank the Brick Can organizers for allowing our team to participate. It was a great opportunity to get work done while spreading the word about FIRST LEGO League. It allowed us to demonstrate part of what the competitions are about and to interact with LEGO fans from all around the world.
 
We would also like to thank the generous people who attended this event and donated to our team to help us reach our goal to go to Estonia.