Planning for the first meeting

An hour and a half is really not much time to be building with Legos.  I probably spent way too much time in my childhood building away, but I remember I could spend an entire Sunday afternoon building and rebuilding.  So I wanted to be very focused and organized in what we did so that the kids would have time to build something significant.  That was a challenge for the first week because the software had to be introduced too.

The other aspect I had to focus on was to get all five kids in a group to participate.  Most programs encourage only two kids per set.  We had to find roles for all five kids to keep busy and having fun.  We settled on giving each child a role and a title:

1) Lead Builder:  Makes the final decision on robot design and orchestrates putting it all together
2) Lead Programmer: Builds the NXT program and works out the bugs
3) Lead Tester:  In charge of setting up the challenge field and running the robot through it's paces
4) Logistics Manager:  In change of all the parts, including keeping them neat and organized
5) Lead Presenter:  At the end of club, will show the whole club the robot, demonstrate the challenge, point out the major design aspects and talk about any challenges and how they were overcome

I worried that the Logistics Manager role might be thought of as kind of lame, but in the end it worked out fine.  In fact they all did.  I emphasized that this is a team effort and everyone can help with every role, but the lead person is in charge.  Also the roles change from week to week, so everyone will get a chance in each role.

Our first challenge was just to build a three wheeled car (one motor for the two front wheels) and a thrid swivel wheel.   A Lego minifigure must be placed 3 feet from the starting line. The car must be programmed to  travel out to the man, circle around him, then drive back.  What a lot of funny driving we saw!  Neither team completely made the circuit correctly, but I think they would have if they had another half hour.  The cars were built well, but the programming is where the problem was, and it was only a lack of time that did them in.

A couple of lessons learned from the first club:

1) We hadn't loaded the software prior to class.  This took a little longer than expected due to some technical reasons, so we didn't start playing with the software until about half way through.
2) Then we wasted a bunch of time trying to get the blue tooth connections to work.  I had set this up at home without problem because I was just using one NXT.  But with three in the room ( we had brought the 3rd one which was our own personal)  we couldn't tell which was which.  [I've since learned how to name them!!!  Ready for next week!!!]  In the end we resorted to using the USB cable.
3) I think now that I should have given an example program for them... Instead I just showed them the basics and let them go to town.  There just wasn't enough time for that.

Looking forward to the next one!!!

Storage Solutions

Keeping organized will be key to spending our short time building and not looking for pieces.  Our storage solution uses the bins supplied with the Lego Mindstorms Education Resource Set (9695), as well as two tackle boxes from Walmart:  The Plano 387001 ($6.96).

On your mark, get set....

We have done it!  We have started an after school Lego Robotics club for my son’s 5^th grade class.  I’ve been having great fun organizing and preparing for it.  (What a great excuse to play with Legos that move, right?)  This is brand new to the school and brand new to me too-- if you don't count me being an engineer and that I spent years of my life building with the things as a child.  Even so, it was a bit daunting deciding how to go about doing this.  I've talked with a couple of people who have lead First Lego League teams and have found tons of information on the web-- so much and in so many forms that it was hard to digest it all.  We have no official curriculum that I have found that fits our needs, so I'm taking bits and pieces of what is out there and making it work for us.

I'm writing this to document the process, so that (1) I can pass on our knowledge and experience to the person who takes over the club next year (I'm hoping to start a First Lego League team next year with some of the graduates) and (2) to add my experiences to the web for any other would-be club developers out there.

I've been prepping for this all summer and wish I started writing earlier, as we already had our first club meeting this afternoon.  It was a great success, I would say (even though neither of the groups quite passed the design challenge successfully), but more on that in another post.   First, here are the rough stats about the club:

Myself and a colleague are running it.  We have ten 5th graders (including my son and my colleague's daughter) in the club.  With two NXT sets to work with, that's 5 kids per group.  We are meeting after school, every other Wednesday.  (I wish it was every Wednesday, but we thought that would be hard to swing with our work schedules.)  The club lasts for an hour and a half and we are planning to run through the whole school year.

Each group uses the retail version NXT set plus the education resource set.  I love that resource set--- it adds so many cool elements.  It also comes with some nice storage bins.  We added two more tackle boxes to store the rest of the gear for each set, resulting in a compact but well organized package of raw creative excitement!