At 10:35 AM -0400 9/14/09, Karen McSweeney Contreras wrote:
>This is a general question for the LL community:
>This is my fourth year coaching a LL team (two
>as JFLL, second as FLL). This year, I have six
>6th grade boys. They are at varying stages of
>focusing abilities and interest in the tasks at
>hand. (Typical boys of their age!.) Any
>suggestions on how to get the most out of the
>season? Last year, we used 3 'bots and three
>lap tops and that seemed to be too
>all-over-the-place. I am going to try 2 'bots
>and '2 laptops this year (then we combine
>everything into 1 'bot). Any thoughts on how to
>divide kids/tasks/etcŠ?
I'm guessing that most coaches have struggled
with this set of issues: keeping the group of
varying personalities and abilities engaged and
focused, and achieving an appropriate balance
between work on the robot and the
research/presentation. You're ahead of the curve
if your team members are largely the same from
year to year, as you know their individual
personalities and strengths, and know which
combinations of kids work well together. In three
years of work with an FLL team, my fellow coaches
and I had at least some success with some of
these strategies:
- Structured meetings. We broke each team meeting
into time blocks that were announced at the
start. For example, a block of free robot time
(energy dissipation), then a block of group
brainstorming or discussion (while brains are
fresh), then a block of time on the research
project or presentation, then a snack, then work
on the robot missions and programming.
- Ancillary meetings. Last year the robot table
and team meetings were in my house, and that gave
me the opportunity to have additional times
during the week when just a few team members
could come and work. This usually meant robot
work, and usually could proceed with only a
modest amount of my involvement (depending on
which kids were there). One caveat is that this
required note-taking so that the rest of the team
would be aware of what had been accomplished.
Occasionally just one team member would show up,
a great occasion for me to spend some one-on-one
time to teach some new programming skill without
distraction.
- Identical robots. We had the luxury of multiple
NXT kits (owned by some of the members). Once the
team agreed on a robot model, they made two
identical clones, which allowed groups of two or
three work on a particular mission without the
rest of the team getting impatient or jealous.
Like Frank's team, ours worked in groups of
(usually) two, each of which had ownership of a
particular set of related missions. This required
multiple computers, and some discipline in
keeping track of which was the "official" version
of a program.
(Re. Phil's comment, it was a challenge to get
some of the boys interested in working on the
research, and a challenge to get the girls to
speak up about their interest in working on the
robot despite being willing to do the researchy
stuff. What helped last year was that the
research project involved poop, and the
presentation involved making a video, both of
which were appealing to the boys!)
Having learned the hard way, I recommend leaving
-plenty- of time before the regional tournament
for creating and practicing the presentation, and
for choreographing and practicing the 2.5-minute
robot game. Once they start running through
those, the team will be full of ideas on how to
do things faster, better, different, and you'll
want enough time for them to work through it all,
so that the team can arrive at the tournament
feeling prepared and confident.
--
Cheers,
Mike Blanpied
Reston, VA
2006 #4809 Nano People
2007 #1666 Power Bunnies
2008 #5013 BLT--Brilliant LEGO Team
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