Getting Organized

So Anna responded to the Edith Bowen Robotics email and let them know I was interested in helping. They let her know that there was a meeting to get organized after school today at 3:45 PM.

Thanks for your interest in being a coach for our Robotics Program.  You have either personally contacted me or one of your children has indicated you might be interested in helping out.  Therefore, I have included all of you on this email.  We are holding a meeting on Monday, November 17, at 3:30 PM in Joan’s room, # 219, to get started with training and then working with the kids and teams.  Please know you can be a coach/leader even if you cannot attend this meeting.  We will notify everyone of the dates and times when the teams will meet after school.  Tentatively, we have set aside Monday and Wednesday from 3:30-4:30 PM for the after school robotics meetings.

I left work early to attend the meeting (fortunately I had some spare change to throw in a parking meter) and got there just as it was starting.

The first presentation was about the First Lego League (FLL) and the USU STEM center's Lego Mindstorms kit by Job Cyril. He is associated with the Utah First Lego League (UTFLL). He was very enthusiastic about FLL as he described how it worked out and the team sizes. I was familiar with most of the material having read up on FLL a number of times over the years. Unfortunately we were getting in the game a little late and there was only one team slot for Lego / FLL. I gave a little of my background that you can find in my first post during the meeting and we spoke after the meeting. He asked if I would be willing to help as a volunteer at the USU FLL Competition on January 10th and I gladly accepted.

The second presentation was about the VEX IQ Robotics System and Challenge, Highrise by Gary Stewardson. He highlighted the advances in VEX for the elementary age students with the IQ system and talked about how the challenge is a cooperative experience. He said that a great feature of the VEX challenges or competitions is the iterative nature, with several events organized before the state finals, giving teams a chance to see what works and adapt. He also felt that many youth really enjoyed the robot driving part of the competitions in addition to the autonomous part and that this gave more variety than the purely autonomous Lego competition experience. He said we would need to get organized fast because the next challenge opportunity was in Logan on December 6th. He invited those interested in seeing VEX in action to observe their club meeting across the street tomorrow afternoon.

This left us having to choose which of two great systems we would support. Well, most of us. I was being steered towards the VEX IQ system. Both looked great so I was happy to help with either, as long as I got to work with Esther. Another parent, Eric Eliason, had also potentially been tapped for VEX IQ because he had done it with the other systems two years earlier. Both of us were waiting to see what our kids picked. There was a USU student who was familiar with and enthusiastic about FLL who was tapped to help with that.