The team held its first meeting on Thursday Sept. 10th. Everyone had a good time and enjoyed the activities.
We started by going ove the details of the research project and talking about what will be required. I had a large-format poster that I hung on the wall, that they can go back and reference throughout the season.
We had a discussion about Lego League “homework”. Each week or so, I will give the kids a small assignment to complete by the next mission. The purpose of this is to expand our research activities beyond just the meeting time. The idea is that each member doing 5-10 minutes of research or brainstorming outside of the meeting results in 45-90 minutes for the group. This won’t be every week, and some weeks may involve looking stuff up on the Internet, from transportation-related sites that I will have pre-screened in advance.
We then watched some more 30-second clips describing each of the robot missions. They are now getting an idea of what they need to make the robot do. That led us into our next activity for the day.
As a teambuilding exercise, and to give a a lesson on programming, we did something called the “Robot Game”. For this, we broke the group up into teams of 3. In each team, there was an Engineer (who decided what the mission was), a Programmer (who got the mission details from the Engineer), and a Robot. It was the programmer’s job to give discrete movement instructions to the robot. These are commands like “Move left foot forward”, “Bend knees”, etc. They weren’t allowed to give high-level commands like “Walk 3 Steps”. The mission was to cross the room and have the “robot” sit in the chair. This turned out to be a fun and educational exercise, and the teams wanted to switch roles and do it again. The outcome is that they learned that they need to break down each required movement of the robot into very small detailed commands.
We then broke the group up again into teams of three.
Group 1 worked on brainstorming ideas about transportation. We looked at the definition of community, and then what types of transportation do we see in that community.
Groups 2 & 3 worked on building the mission models again for the robot playing field. This activity is almost complete.
We then cleaned up for the day.
Our next meeting is Thursday Sept. 24th.
-Coach Brian
