Group specializations, or not

The second weekday meeting of the Monday/Wednesday team was a little scattered. I was hoping we would have our engineering notebook by now and was trying to get some VEX related software installed on a couple of school computers. I tasked the team with coming up with a name while I worked on those things and they were still unable to come up with something they all agreed on. I tried working through some word associations from books they have read but still no dice.

We then reviewed the tasks they wanted to accomplish by the next challenge and discussed ideas on how to best accomplish the tasks. I suggested breaking into smaller groups focusing on driving, designing and building, programming and the STEM project but they all wanted to drive and do the other things and felt it would not be fair if they didn't get a chance to do everything. So much for specialization. This approach has some advantages, like everyone learning from all the stages, but misses out on the advantages from specialization. I'll bring the choice up again when we get closer to the next challenge.

What I said isn't quite correct. Not everyone was excited about building. All but one were until I said that they need to design before building, then it dropped down to just two and even they weren't exited. I'll have to figure out a way to help them see that it's a good thing to spend a little more time in the thinking and designing stage of the Think-Do-Test iteration loop. I suspect the same kind of thing will show up in the programming.

Speaking of programming, it sounds like most of the team members have had some exposure already. None of them had seen Scratch, but at least two were familiar with doing JavaScript programming stuff on Kahn Academy. After showing them Modkit the first exclamation was "That's too easy!" We'll see how they do programming the robot. I'll trade "too easy" for time wasted running down a syntax error unless they are able to write a winning program in an hour and get bored because it's too easy.

They decided to work on the research project from home after school on Fridays, when they have more time and will collaborate via a shared Google Drive document. This year's STEM research project, as they correctly remembered, is suppose to focus on engineering. The VEX Robotics group has put together a table of how the research project can be mapped to education standards.

I hope that picking an engineering research project isn't as big of a hurdle as picking a team name.