RECAP -- Week #1 Meeting

meeting#1-Team(mostly)Smiling

meeting#1-Team(mostly)Serious

meeting#1-Team(all)Silly

meeting#1-LegoCreatorTeamBuilding

meeting#1-DiscussionGroup

This first meeting of the Redstone Robotics Incorporated FIRST LEGO League team has just successfully completed. All five (5) boys on the team have been accounted for and survived. Highlights included:

(1) Play with kitties

(2) Xbox One team play

(3) Pizza

(4) Introduction videos to the First Lego League challenges, core values, and robot game

(5) Discussion of what we are going to invent for our challenge

(6) Group Lego building and team building exercises

(7) Laser Tag

The topic for this year’s First Lego League is “Animal Allies” and covers how we as humans interact with and benefit from animals (and they from us). An idea for our project this year is to design and build a device that keeps the deer away from (our) raised vegetable beds. We talked about the difference senses that animals use to sense danger—sight, sounds, touch, smell, taste—and design a device appropriately. Perhaps something with a motion sensor that turns on lights, a water sprinkler, and a speaker that plays predator sounds.

We talked about the “core values” of First Lego league, which essentially boils down to be respectful and a good teammate.

For the Lego team building exercises, the kids discussed how to build a Lego Creator kit as a team. After each build, we would discuss what worked and what didn’t work and tried to adjust the team building method accordingly. At the end we discussed “programming” the Lego boat with instructions to move from one corner of the table to the dot in the middle—e.g. move forward to the second diamond, turn right 90 degrees, move on top of dot, turn right 90 degrees. Next week, we will try building again with the following goals: (a) silent, and (b) beat our build time from last week. Also next week, we will have all of our Lego Robotics kits delivered and will begin building and programming with them.

I have attached some pictures of the team. Thank you for entrusting your kids to me. I think they’ll get a lot out of the process and each other. If you have any comments or feedback from your kids, then let me know.

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