Walk into work, play with LEGOs, and go home, relieved of stress.

This is how someone described the team-building, innovation-inspiring event that took place today.

And boy, was it fun! When Sypris’ engineers need a break from stressful times and could use a refresher on how to be innovative, they go all out. The 32 engineers broke up into 8 teams of 4 and had at it…building robots, that is.

In a reminiscent day of FLL, members of Team Duct Tape helped Sypris’ engineers understand the rules and dynamics of last year’s FLL challenge, Power Puzzle. We ran around to the different groups, answering the bounty of questions on rules, programming, and building…without letting the engineers have all the answers. After only about 3 and 1/2 hours of building (whereas many FLL teams have 40-80 hours from September to February), the teams got to the playing field to compete for the prize: top score. After the first round, one team, the “Men With a Yellow Hat” scored 205 points, an impressive catch after only one day. After another round of no one beating their score, they moved to the finals, where the “Johnny Five” won by five points.

The Johnny Five received the NXT sets as prized for top score, and the Men With a Yellow Hat won the sets for the Innovation Award. Another team, whose name evades me (only known to me as team 2) won the teamwork prize and received tickets to a Lightning game.

Overall, Team Duct Tape got a chance to mentor, to be mentored, and to have a great time.

Coaches Notes: Team member, Hunter’s, post says it all. The Innovation Day event at Sypris Electronics was great fun.  Team members learned about some great problem solving techniques, including the Six Thinking Hats, the Reframing Matrix , and Brain Writing . And we all had a great time seeing these techniques applied in real time problem solving.  Many thanks to Sypris Electronics for inviting us to be part of your National Engineers Week event!