Wednesday, November 1, 2006

Well, we didn't get very good attendance today. I guess most of the kids didn't know we were meeting. Perhaps we weren't clear enough yesterday when we told everyone that there was going to be meetings on Wednesdays and Thursdays too. Today I just saw a lot of the RCX kids going for the nanowire mission, and I really wanted to the NXT kids on that too, but when I tried to get the girl to strengthen the the arm that they had made, we couldn't do the nanotip mission anymore for some reason. Also, the robot kept running into the the nanotip base for some reason. We could edit the program again I guess, but I think it was a positioning issue, and the fact that we had changed around the arm. Unfortunately, I won't be able to help her any tomorrow because I'm going to have to go talk to some judges. I also think we're going to get even less attendance tomorrow.
I had to leave twenty minutes early because of some family things, so I didn't get to see if the NXT group made any progress. I feel a little bad because they only have one kid showing up, and so I'm trying to work with her a lot, and I think that she's feeling a lot of pressure. I'm sure it would help if any of her fellow teammates would at least show up, but no one else except their presenter came. I thought that she did really good yesterday, especially because we were so successful with programming the NXT, but today she might have felt like it was all up to her. She might have also felt a little bit alienated because she isn't really working that much with the other kids. But its our jobs as mentors to make them feel good and important while they learn, so I'll really try to make her feel comfortable.
On another note, the competition is coming up really soon, so next week I'm going to try to push the kids to have at least two tasks accomplished, and their robots to be reliable. Some groups were able to do a mission usually, and I just don't think that's good enough. They need to be able to do a mission ten out of ten tries, or else they won't stand a chance against the other lego veteran teams.

- Kyle Norquist