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!!!