Progress Check-in

On Wednesday and Thursday the first week of December, we're at a pivotal point. We're a month into meeting and have about a month left until the competition. It's the halfway mark.

As we continued working on the rocket launch mission where they have to hit the launcher and make the spaceship fly up a certain height, we were trying to find something heavy enough, and one of the kids suggested using the metal sphere that serves as a wheel on the back of the robot. You can use any Lego pieces, and that is from Lego, so it's legal. We're still trying to figure out how to make sure to hit it accurately every time, but with a heavier hammer, there's a better chance of it working.

I asked the kids to demonstrate at the end of one of the team meeting times all the missions and how close they were. They didn't have to work 100%, just sort of work, enough that we could see the idea that the robot would travel and make an action that seemed like it could accomplish the mission. Even if it missed or didn't hit hard enough or whatever, I just wanted them to be able to demonstrate where they were at, more for themselves, to help figure out how much more they have to go. At some point, we will need to connect all the missions, mostly including having the robot return to base where the arm can be swapped out and the robot aimed at the next mission.

The demonstration was okay. Half the missions they demonstrated were things they hadn't worked on in a couple weeks and while they were supposed to be practicing with them to be ready to demonstrate, some of them they hadn't even found the code or re-tested it once. The robot is a little different shape than it was previously with changing out the back wheel for the hammer, so what they programmed before didn't exactly work. I tried to make the point that this is what they were supposed to be preparing for.

We also talked today about the project. I had sort of maybe kind of known there was this other part to the competition but hadn't really looked at this part very hard, since we didn't actually do a competition last year. I remember looking at the challenge a year ago, but since we did a demonstration at the school and not an actual competition, the project didn't feature into what we were doing.

The short description of it is that they pick a problem related to the theme of the year - space, this year - and research a solution to the problem. They were sent home with a homework assignment to come back next week with an idea of a possible problem and solution pair that we could use. They do a presentation that takes under 5 minutes. It can be creative - doesn't have to be totally realistic or ultra-professional. They just have to show they are working together and creatively problem-solving. I think the project sounds kind of fun. One of the kids said, "that sounds boring." I explained that it will be boring if they make it boring or interesting if they make it interesting. So there we are. We'll see tomorrow what they come back with.

Double Up

For the last week of November and moving forward, we've added an extra session each week. Instead of just meeting on Wednesdays right after school, we will be meeting on both Wednesdays and Thursdays. There is a lot to get done with the competition coming up fast.

We broke out on Wednesday and Thursday of this week into groups and had various people working on different missions. One of the missions is close, with the group that has been focusing and working on things. Focus is definitely an issue, as we have a lot of kids and it's difficult to get them all on task at the same time. We've had some parents coming in to help with crowd control a bit, which has been good.

We did have some of them working on a new mission, which functions kind of like the big mallet and bell at a carnival, where you hit the target with the mallet or sledgehammer and it makes the weight go up and hit the bell, except it's a spaceship that has to go high enough to get into orbit. It's a fun one to work on, although to me it seems more error-prone. I assigned one of the team to be in charge of thinking about risk vs. reward and the likelihood of something working or not working to help us focus on the things we know we can accomplish and get some points out of. Not that we shouldn't try hard things, but we want to get some points.

We did confirm the name Digicorns. I guess they're all set on that, so there we go.

The Mission

For our second meeting on November 14, we talked about name options some more. The two top names ended up being Digicorns (portmanteau of Digital and Unicorns) and Rockets. My preferred name from last year, Botrockers, didn't make the final list, which was unfortunate. I told them we would decide between the two names the next week after they had a chance to think about it and make sure they felt good about it.

We also finished building the stock robot this day. A few of the missions were built, so we could show how to do them. We also watched some videos of other people solving the various missions. They had a homework assignment to go home and watch some videos of the various missions and decide which ones they wanted to work on, based on what they thought they could realistically accomplish.



A big issue at this point was realizing the competition is going to be on January 5, instead of February 2, giving us a month less time to get ready.

New Team New Name

I haven't been keeping up with writing down what we've been doing each week. So I'm going to try to go back and reproduce things here as to what we've done over the past month. Our first meeting was on November 7. We kept things fairly simple and talked about team name ideas, introduced everyone, and talked about what some of the missions would be.

We also started building the basic robot. The field wasn't put together yet, but the plans were to have it ready in the next week or two.

No, really

I thought we were ready to start our season earlier than we did last year. I guess we will be starting about the same time. We have an official competition in 3 months, so we have a more firm deadline than we had last year.

We have a good mix of those who have experience from last year and new team members. We also have a mix of boys and girls, which I think will be good. We had a lot of bouncing off the walls on last year's team.

I think we are setting a good foundation for the next couple years with several younger students. Our first meeting is next week, so here we go! No, really this time.

New Year, New Lego Challenge

We are starting earlier with our Lego teams than we did last year. Last year we had our initial information meeting in October and didn't start meeting until November and didn't have the challenge kit set up until weeks after tournaments had already taken place after the first of the calendar year. This year, we had an information meeting in early September and almost have the teams all nailed down.

There are two or three times as many students interested in doing Lego Robotics this year compared to last year. There are many new students and many who have experience. We went into things last year knowing we were just setting the stage for this year. I look forward to seeing how it goes.

Images

Just some random images I've saved over the last little bit, because I thought they were funny:

Facebook = AOL

I remember in the late 90s being at the house of a friend who was (and is) very tech savvy. The thing that blew me away was that he was dialing up to AOL and looking something up through their portal. Why would anyone use AOL for anything? Well, anything other than creating wall-sized art projects with all the AOL CDs they had gotten in the mail.

The problem is that it was a closed community. It simplified and filtered out the raw parts of the full Internet. It tried to create a one-size-fits-all view of the Web, and by doing so limited the interesting bits, and the potential for growth was stymied.

In the years that followed, AOL declined in favor of interesting startups that promised the world. Some lasted. Some didn't. I still miss the blogging days of about 2006-2010 when the Web seemed limitless, and everyone was so excited to be sharing information with each other. Around that time, however, Facebook opened to everyone and provided an easy to use platform that was filled with hip college students who had been using it out of sight of prying eyes.

Facebook grew, adding in messaging, unlimited picture sharing, a mobile app, and so on. It structured things more rigidly than MySpace. It became the place where everyone who wanted to communicate was on it. Only the Luddites avoided it.

Fast forward to the growth of advertising, meddling Russians, commercial adoption, and the dagger to the heart - the news feed algorithm. I think having companies on FB is not bad, as they can provide an easy way to message and provide deals to their customers. But ripping out the reverse chronological feed of simply everything posted by everyone you knew and were friends with, in favor of FB deciding what it thought you would want to see, that is to me the beginning of the end.

A former student of mine who got a job as a project manager at FB after taking my project management class (before even completing the rest of the degree program and graduating), told me that it is all numbers driven. FB knows that people who use the algorithmic news feed spend significantly longer on the site than those who use the most recent chronological feed. I think that's because they are confused and can't find what they want. Or because most of the content is hidden from the chronological view and only shown on the news feed. The news feed is the default, and I'll often see a glance of something interesting before I switch to the most recent feed, and as I scroll down through the most recent posts, the interesting item from someone who I am friends with never comes up, even when it should.

Then it hit me. We've just rebuilt AOL. We have a one-size-fits-all platform, tightly controlled by their corporate decision makers. We have control of content handed to advertisers. We have an experience that is locked down to be as simple as possible. Look only at the death of blogs for an example of this. It used to be that people would write daily or maybe a couple times a week but at least monthly. And they would write a lot. They would customize the look of the blog, although generally without getting too much into MySpace-esque horrid background designs. The most important, though, is that they would write a lot. Long articles they would work for a long time on, with curated pictures embedded right in the text where it was discussed. Bloggers would link to other blogs or posts on their own blog. The comment section would run wild. What do people write now? A couple sentences? Maybe a full paragraph? Pictures are out there sort of with no context other than a short description. If a post is longer than a couple sentences you can click on a link to show more, but if it's longer than a couple paragraphs it loads into a totally new page that people don't even wait for it to completely load to shut it down. TL;DR (too long; didn't read) becomes the name of the game. That to me is the saddest part of it. We lost thoughtful discussion and editing of deep content in favor of clicking a like button and a couple sentences of writing. The biggest innovation was the reaction buttons where you could not only like something but mark it as something you dislike or are angry or surprised about. We don't even need to write a response showing our surprise. Just click the surprised button.

My favorite part that keeps me coming back to FB every day is the memories, where it will show what you posted on that day some number of years ago. It's a fun way to relive things that have been posted over the past 10 years or so. It's a little private section of memories just for me (that I don't reshare, although some people do). But what is the majority of content on my wall? I've posted about this a couple times recently, here and here, and it hasn't changed much, so I won't do an update. But it's just curated content from big media companies for the most part.

Think about when you do see something interesting on FB, and you go to tell someone else about it (IRL), chances are they have already seen it. Everyone else has already seen the same viral video, the same breaking news story, or the same joke or meme. Think about how decades ago before the rise of cable, everyone watched the same TV shows at the same time, with some time shifting as VCRs became popular. Then cable hit, and everyone was watching different shows. Eventually we had DVRs and later ubiquitous streaming options. But we've cycled back around to everyone watching the same shows or other content. If you're behind on a series, you have to avoid FB so as to avoid spoilers, but then you miss other things, too, so you have to catch up with everyone else.

We have moved away from a creation- and sharing-oriented platform to one of consumption. It's easier to consume what others have created than to create and share our own. And who is creating that content that we are consuming? Big media that invests heavily in FB to keep our attention, because we are afraid of missing out if we disconnect.

Humor Rules

A few random notes to remember from Scott Adams' podcast about humor:

Adams discussed what he called the 2 of 6 rule. The idea is that there are 6 elements to make something funny. For something to then be funny, it needs to have at least 2 of the elements. If it has even more, that's better. An excellent comedian will be able to hit 3 points. A 4 of 6 is rare. The elements are:

• Mean
• Bizarre
• Clever
• Naughty
• Recognizable
• Cute

That's why a sitcom will always have a small child or pet, since that adds an element of cute. Adams plays with Dilbert in the recognizable realm. When he has Dogbert (cute dog wagging his little tail) say something mean, that puts him at a 3 before he has even decided on the joke.

Some corollary principles have to be considered as well.

One is that about 30% of the public has no sense of humor. They won't know a joke even if it has 5/6 elements in it.

He also discusses punching up vs. punching down. The idea is that if someone is in some type of power situation, a joke is less funny and possibly offensive for the higher power person punching down at the people below them. He discussed a few examples of Donald Trump and things he said while on the campaign trail, which now seem like he was punching down, but at the time when he was yet unelected, he was punching up. Punching up makes it more funny, because you're getting back at The Man.

Another principle is that the funnier a joke is, the more you can get away with. I think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I think at some point they hit all 6 points, even if not all at the same time. There are some pretty raunchy things in there that they get away with, because the rest of it is so funny.

The final principle is what he calls the Uncanny Valley. This is where if you have something that is artificial, but obviously artificial, it can come across as cute - most of the droids in Star Wars fall in this category - BB-8 is cute, because it is nothing like a living thing. But if something artificial is almost realistic but not quite, it becomes disgusting or creepy. Think here of staying at a family member's house and waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a row of dolls staring back at you. Almost realistic, and very creepy! I think the main reason for this principle is that if you're going for cute, make sure you don't cross the line into creepily almost-realistic.

Next time you need to make up a joke, grab as many of the principles as you can, make sure you punch up, and don't be creepy.

Tragedy of the Common Carrier

The Tragedy of the Commons is a well-known example in economics of how a common or public resource can be destroyed through over-use.

Adam Smith's famous Invisible Hand worked differently as he applied it to privately owned resources. Take the richest person you can find, and their wealth and resources are distributed to the poor due to the fact that the rich person will hire others to help take care of the estate. They can't possibly consume everything they own or create, and they can't take care of it either. Hiring someone poorer than them helps to maintain or grow the estate, while benefiting others at the same time. This is in some way the basis for Trickle-down Economics.

A commons, however, is a public space, with no majordomo to place limitations on its use. The tragedy comes in when this public resource is overused to the point that it becomes useless. Normally individuals acting in their own self-interest will provide a net benefit to society through their actions. The problem is that public lands can be overgrazed, roads can be shut down by gridlock, and a once-beautiful park can be spoiled by trash.

The stock market has the potential to be destroyed by those large players who manipulate it in a variety of ways.

I think our phone system has all but passed this point. Between mobile phones, the Internet, and scam calls, something major needs to happen to fix the problems that our common carrier phone system is faced with. There used to be natural limitations on abuses of the phone system, long distance calling rates being one of the biggest. There is no security system in place with our phones, as they were built as a commons, to allow anyone to call anyone if you had their number (and these were published). With the advent of free calling via VoIP, the minimal cost gatekeeper is gone, and untraceable nuisance phone calls flourish. Scammers are riding a dying wave, as fewer and fewer people have a landline anymore, and fewer people answer phone calls that they aren't expecting. There are still a few people left to scam, so they continue trying, and as they do, they hammer their own coffin even tighter.

With many messaging and voice apps available, we still have options to communicate within private systems. This requires that everyone maintains multiple accounts, in order to have the ability to talk with different groups. Those under Apple's spell are locked into their communication tools, yet there are many other providers. Facebook had gotten too big and has taken a stumble because it got away from its original mission and sold out to scammers and advertisers, so alternatives arise. It is a pain to deal with so many protocols and username/password combos, but the pain and cost is what puts up just enough of a wall to keep tragedy at bay.