Sky, Eve Y wrote: > My suggestion is to be real about the outcome of competition. I'll second that as good advice. My first time out as a coach, I had a completely rookie team of really young kids. We talked as a group about how much of a challenge it would be to get the robot to do all the missions, and instead planned to focus on doing just three missions--the kids picked what they thought were the three easiest. That may not be the best number for every team, but it was the one we settled on. Over the weeks of working on the missions, they came to see their job as "get these three missions done", rather than "do every mission" or "score 400 points". That really helped keep them from becoming overwhelmed, especially when they didn't have *any* missions working and the tournament was only a week away! When they were finally able to get all three missions going, they had a huge sense of accomplishment. They went on to try even more, making last minute adjustments through the regional tournament itself. But having some reasonable expectations up front about what they were trying to do made a huge difference in how they saw themselves as they went along. -- Steve --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Virginia Tech, CS Dept. Web-CAT: Web-based Center for Software Testing 2050 Torgersen Hall (0106) Automatic grading using student-written tests Blacksburg, VA 24061 USA http://web-cat.org/ (540)-231-5723 http://people.cs.vt.edu/~edwards/ ______________________________________________________________ To UNSUBSCRIBE or CHANGE YOUR SETTINGS, please visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-l.html and select "Join or leave the list". If you want to join the VADCFLL-ADMIN-L mailing list - to which FLL administrative announcements will be distributed - visit https://listserv.jmu.edu/archives/vadcfll-admin-l.html and select "Join or leave the list".