First Meeting for the First Lego League

About two months ago, my kids' elementary school was holding a meeting for parents interested in help out with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) initiatives at the school. The principal's vision is to earn a STEM designation for the school, which opens up opportunities for a variety of grants and programs. I couldn't make it to the meeting but told them I was willing to help however I could.

About a month ago, I had a meeting with the principal, where we talked about some of the things they need help with, such as the science fair, Odyssey of the Mind, a STEM night for families and students at the school, and a STEM committee that would be in charge of paperwork regarding the STEM designation. Some of those things needed more help than others, but the one we ended up really chasing down was the idea of a First Lego League robotics team. The school also has some VEX robots from a robotics club that was running a couple years ago, but we decided to start with Lego.

This seemed like a great idea, so the principal sent out a request to see what students would be interested in participating, as well as if there were other parents who would be willing to help coach. There was enough interest to create three teams! Another dad and I are two of the coaches, plus they made a team of students in the After School Club (ASC), which is run by college students, so one of those students will be their coach.

We had a parents night last week, where we talked about the program, answered questions, and I did a quick demo of a robot I built to show the kinds of things they can do. The principal split up the team assignments, and we are ready to go.

So yesterday after school was our first session. I brought my robot that I built, which at some point will be disassembled, because the kids have to do all the work, plus I don't know what our robot will need to look like yet to perform the various tasks in the challenge. But it's good to have something basic to show off how it works. The ASC team is assembling the challenge kit, since they're there every day anyway. The other teams are only there once a week.

I figured we would start with a little Forming, so prepared a few activities designed to get to know everyone - start learning names and personalities. I brought the robot but didn't do much more than show the basic demo of it driving and moving a block around ... and put it away several times as every time I turned around, someone would get it out again. They're excited, which is good.

The first thing I had them do was write their names on the white board and draw a picture of something that represented them, then get up and explain to us what they drew and why. One kid would only write his name really small down in the corner and another wouldn't draw a picture for some reason, but overall that worked well. I drew a mountain bike for my picture.

Then we tried doing the human knot. Did I mention these are nine and ten year old boys? Let's just say it didn't work. There was pushing and pulling and trampling and crying. You know the drill. So we sat back at our conference table and started talking about rules. I had three that I had come up with and asked for their feedback on mine and if they had some they wanted to add:

• Be positive
• Everything is a learning experience
• Everyone has something to offer

They came up with a variety of rules, such as no throwing people out the window and no creating a robot atomic bomb. I pointed out that those probably fit within the existing rules, since if someone was tossed out the window, they wouldn't be able to share what they had to offer, and an atomic bomb isn't positive. We talked a little about what we could learn from the failed human knot. The boys came up with an additional rule that seemed simple but will take some work:

• Focus

 I'll try to refine those a little more so there's a short/catchy version of each rule with maybe an interesting acronym (better than BEEF), plus a more full, descriptive version of each. But I want to keep it simple.

The last thing we did was an activity to start thinking about programming logic. I put some chairs in one corner of the room, making a basket to try to drop a basketball into. One of the boys was the robot, blindfolded at the opposite corner of the room, with several table and chairs to work around. Three of the boys were designated as the programmers, who were to give instructions to the robot. Three of the boys were designated as programmer judges. Their job was to rate how good of a job the programmers did at giving clear directions. The other three were designated as robot judges. Their job was to rate how well the robot did at following directions.

There was a clear lane around the outside of the room, but the programmers decided to send him through the minefield in the middle of the room, including having him climb over a table at one point. When it was time to put the ball in the basket, rather than having him place or drop it in, they had him throw it. The robot missed.

We talked about some situations where they gave unclear or incorrect directions, like telling the robot to turn 15 degrees, without saying in which direction and which should have actually been 90 degrees. They told him to walk forward a certain number of steps instead of just saying to walk forward until he bumped into something. When the programmers told him to climb over the table, he was blindfolded so didn't know where the table was. It took three minutes, and the ball didn't go where it was supposed to. But we learned some things.

We wrapped up talking about how it was probably difficult to remember everything they observed while the activity was happening in order to talk about it later, so they needed notebooks to write down what was happening along the way. Their homework is to get a notebook to bring next time so they can keep notes on what they do and how well it works. The other assignment is to bring a couple of ideas for a team name. I told them that while they got to make the suggestions and vote on what they liked, I reserved the right to veto any name I didn't like, so it needed to be an awesome name. "Wait, so we can't name ourselves Team Underpants?" If you have to ask, it's probably not going to happen.