Good morning! First, I would like to thank the Sims and the Brackens for their generous donations to support our team! We couldn’t do what we do without our amazing sponsors!
Second, we had our first FIRST Lego League meeting yesterday! We met with the members of Bitflip Jr. and their parents to introduce them to FLL and to go over some housekeeping points. When the parents left, we played some ice breaker games with the kids. The first one was Human Knot. To play this game, you stand in a circle and grab the hands of two different people who are not standing directly to your left or right. Then, you have to untangle. It’s a great teambuilding exercise and a lot of fun!
For our second ice breaker, the kids teamed up into pairs of two and wrote out instructions for building a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Then, they read the instructions out to a mentor. However, the mentor’s job was to follow the instructions as badly as possible. This activity is designed to introduce the students to what coding is like; robots can only follow the exact instructions you give them and cannot interpret the intentions of the programmer. If you tell your robot to put peanut butter on the sandwich, for instance, it may just put the unopened jar on top of two pieces of bread. We played a second round, and as the students’ instructions became more specific, the “robots” were able to make better sandwiches.
We had a great first meeting and look forward to an amazing season!