First Lego League

Well, it was a long day at the tournament (our team had to be there at 7am and we left after 5pm), and I have very mixed feelings. This "NanoQuest" tournament was for kids not yet in high school.

I'm happy for our (4th and 5th grade) kids because they won three awards. I would also give them the most excited (surprised?) award of all 49 teams. They had a lot of fun and realized that hard work pays off. (I don't know if they would feel quite the same if they didn't win anything.) We came in 18th out of 49 teams in the robot part of the competition.

First Lego League is getting to be Big Time. They mentioned that our governor wants to provide funds for all middle schools in the state to be able to have teams. For those who don't know about it yet, they hold the tournament once a year. It consists of two parts, centered around a new theme each year. This year it was nanotechnology. (Classic top-down, hands-on learning)

One part involves programming a robot constructed out of Lego pieces. There is the main computer and a number of input and output ports to control motors and sensors. Each year the teams get a new 4 X 8 foot map with lego missions that have to be done. The team tries to do as many missions as possible in 2 1/2 minutes. One of the missions was to push a truck up onto a platform, back up, and then trigger a release mechanism to raise the truck. Another mission was to deliver a "dirt trap" across the board and then push a device that would release the dirt into the trap. The team gets points for each mission they accomplish. They get three (two and a half minute) attempts to get their robot to make the most points. Forty-nine teams with up to 10 kids per team, coaches, parents, three attempts spaced at intervals of an hour and a half. Lots of people, lots of noise, and a DJ who sounded like Sylvester Stallone. I expected to hear the theme from Rocky. For those who have seen him the Spy Kids movie, I expected to hear him yell "Game Over".

The other part of the tournament was the project on nanotechnology. The kids had to research the subject, come up with a topic, and put together a presentation. Creative is the word, even though the goal is an invention. There are no right or wrong answers. Our team put together a skit for a nanotool to reduce nanofriction. It was seriously cute. It won first prize.

The team that won the overall competition, and gets to go to Atlanta for the national tournament, was part of a year-round robotics club. They got most all of the points possible.


Why do I have mixed feelings? You can probably guess. I'll put it this way. How many of these kids go to schools where they are teaching math that will virtually guarantee they will never have the skills to get into a college of engineering? How can excitement and love of engineering, robots, and teamwork overcome bad math curricula? Our public school sent three teams of 8th graders to the tournament, but only provides CMP + algebra lite for 8th grade math. On purpose.

As a coach, it was my job to lead the kids and not tell them what to do. I got to facilitate discovery learning myself. It doesn't work. They want kids to experience the real world issues of a big project with specific deadlines. However, most projects in the real world have team members who aren't starting with absolutely no knowledge. What's a facilitator to do? Teach. It's a fine line. You have to teach them the skills they need and then prod them in the right direction. Fundamental learning and project deadlines don't mix. Top down, real world projects are not the way to teach low level skills.

Rather than taking the time to really learn what the robot can or can't do, everyone jumped right in and started doing things. It took the longest time to figure out that the robot was not a reliable piece of equipment. Even at the tournament, the common complaint was repeatability. Coaches and parents said that kids would get really excited when the robot accomplished a mission, only to be equally deflated when they ran it again and it completely failed. I was the coach for the robotics part of the competition. We couldn't get our robot to move in a straight line. We finally realized that it wasn't exactly weight symmetrical and one tire was a tiny bit flatter than the other tire. (If one tire traveled pi*d in one rotation, and the other tire rotated pi*(d-epsilon) in one rotation, then the robot won't go straight.) Then, there was the problem of turning a specific angle. It just couldn't be done reliably. Our robot sometimes decided to start spinning around in circles when told to turn 60 degrees. Although it is the job of engineers to deal with and overcome equipment issues, having the skills to discover (troubleshoot) these problems do not exist in kids.

It is EXTREMELY frustrating for kids to discover things when they do not have the knowledge and skills to do so. Trial and error discovery learning is no fun and very inefficient. That's why coaches teach. They may not tell the kids what to do, but they directly TEACH a whole lot of KNOWLWDGE and SKILLS.

Now, for next year, the kids will have less to DISCOVER, but will do a whole lot better.