A Letter to My Lego Robtotics Team

A Letter to my Lego Robotics Team

Dear Brick Builders:

This past Saturday, we spent 8 hours together in a hot, crowded gymnasium at North Quincy High School. The FIRST Lego League Quincy Qualifier was the culmination of seven weeks of your hard work. I say "your" because you ten boys did every ounce of work. That's what FLL is all about: kids do all the work, with guidance and encouragement from their coaches.

When we first met, we were ten boys and three moms in a classroom. Saturday, we entered the gym as a team. The definition of that word is "...a number of persons associated together in work or activity." While that applies to your effort, it doesn't begin to scratch the surface of your accomplishment.

Let me recap everything you achieved over the seven weeks. You worked together to build our FLL Field, an obstacle course of Lego components that included a bridge, a truck on a ramp, several walls, barrels and that dreaded dynamometer. (Did any of you know what a dynamometer was before this? I didn't).

You designed and built a Lego robot. Right up until an hour before your first match, you were making modifications to the wheels and the attachments. You pooled your good ideas together to create the robot, debating the merits of front motors versus rear motors, a fixed wheel versus a swiveling wheel. Everyone had an opinion on what might work and you respected that. You never said words like "That won't work" or "That's a dumb idea." Instead, you weighed the pros and cons and together decided what worked best.

You learned how to program that robot, and discovered that it didn’t always perform the way you wanted it to. How many times did you go back to the computer, making tiny changes to your program? One hundred? Five hundred? As a team, you didn't get discouraged or give up. You kept working until the last minutes of the last class. You learned perseverance.

When it came to our research project, you voted on everything from our team name to how we defined our community. You brought in lists of every possible type of transportation in our town and brainstormed ideas on how to make improvements. In the end, you chose teleportation as a solution. Other people might have dismissed that idea as science fiction, but you researched everything you could find on the subject and discovered that scientists are making advances in the field. You wrote an extremely funny commercial for a teleporter, incorporating all the ways that teleportation could improve our lives. When it came time to present your project to the judges, you boldly assembled in front of the classroom and performed flawlessly.

Throughout the long, exhausting day, you held it together. When it was time to put the robot through its paces, you stood in pairs at the mission table, in front of hundreds of cheering spectators, and calmly ran your mission. You graciously let every team member who wanted to take a turn at the table have one. When you weren't running a mission, you were on the sidelines, wearing your tie-dye team shirts proudly. My fondest memory is seeing your group, at the top of the bleachers, shaking your bodies to the music and cheering on not just Hanover, but teams from all over the region. (Of course when it was Hanover's turn, you cheered the loudest.) Although our team didn't win an award, you cheered for the Hanover Middle School team that did. You knew that a win for any Hanover team was a win for all of us.

You learned a lot these last seven weeks. Did you know that I learned something too? Yes, I learned about robots and programming and all the rules of the competition. But I also learned that you can take ten kids with wildly different personalities, encourage them to think big, ask them to respect each other, get them to tap into their creative abilities and have them come out the other side as a team to be reckoned with. You taught me that you don't necessarily need to play music to be a rock star.

Your assistant coaches, Mrs. Marriner and Mrs. Courtney, invested more than just their time. They invested their encouragement, patience, and enthusiasm. They deserve a medal too.

Your team reminds me of the 2004 Red Sox. No matter where you go from this point, no matter what future team you may join, no matter what your achievements might be, when I see one of you I will remember the incredible team I had the pleasure to coach for seven weeks in the fall of 2009. Thank you.

Your Coach,
Mrs. Anderson

Holy S*#t! I'm a Geek!

I’ve never been accomplished at math and science (my strength lies in English). I'm able to navigate my iPhone relatively well, though if you asked me to try something advanced, I'd have to consult my expert friend Maria (ditto the iPod and iTunes). I love my computer, but mainly because it's a Mac. Something about that smiley face that appears on start-up just warms my heart (except for the time that a question mark replaced the smiley face...that's bad.) I tried to read "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking but it made my brain hurt. I nearly failed high school chemistry.

Add this all up (can you to add it up for me since I'm not great at math?) and I doubt anyone would mistake me for a brainiac. So how did I end up a geek at the age of 46?
　
What is a geek? The dictionary lists three separate definitions: "A peculiar or otherwise dislikable person, especially one who is perceived to be overly intellectual." Nope, definitely not me. Another definition is "a carnival performer who performs sensationally morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken." Well, we all know how attached I got to the little red hen that found it's way into my yard, so I guess we can discount that as well. The last definition seems to fit what most people think when they hear the term geek: "A computer expert or enthusiast (a term of pride as self-reference, but often considered offensive when used by outsiders.)"

Computer expert? Enthusiast? Hardly. As a college freshman, I was proud of my new electric typewriter. In my senior year, I was required to take a computer-programming course. This was back in the days when computers were all semi-colon, ampersand, backslash gibberish (hey, remember IMB punch cards?) Suffice it to stay, I nearly flunked the course. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were just getting started in their pitched battle of Apple vs. Microsoft when I graduated in 1985. It wasn't until years later that an employer forced me to learn how to use a Mac and my impression of computers changed overnight. The door to potential geekdom was opened.

Not long ago I decided to activate our Tivo. The system was given to us as a gift, yet sat in the closet for nearly two years. Every time I opened the lid, several snake-like wires confronted me with dangerous looking connectors on the ends. I'd slam the box shut and toss it back in the closet. Finally, after hearing my friends sing the praises of their DVRs, I decided to give it a try (Why didn't I ask my husband, the video editor, to hook it up for me? Because that would have been too easy.) After a couple of hours wrangling with our outdated television, cable box, VCR (yes, we still had one) and the Tivo DVR, I was greeted by another smiley face: that of the Tivo logo, a happy little television with a perky smile and Shrek horns. I had successfully installed and activated my Tivo. Another milestone on the road to geekhood.

This year I've jumped full force into geekdom by agreeing to coach my son's Lego Robotics team. I'd previously volunteered as an assistant coach, which was less about robots and programming and more about keeping 3rd and 4th graders in line. As a lead coach, my responsibilities include overseeing their research project, motivating them to work as a team, understanding the rules of the competition in which the team will participate, as well as guiding them in designing and programming a Lego robot.

Overwhelming? To say the least. But given my success with the Tivo (still lovin' it!) I forged ahead. I jumped on the FIRST Lego League website and read everything I could about this year's challenge. I consulted Tricia Smith, the founder of the Hanover Lego Robotics program, on anything and everything. Instead of my trash-of-the-month book I bought "The Unofficial Lego Mindstorms NXT Inventor's Guide". But my geek final exam was taken and passed last week.

While building a demo robot to show my team, I noticed that the instructions didn't allow the rear wheel to move freely. Was it a mistake? I had followed the diagram to the letter. Was the rear wheel really intended to just drag behind the robot? Patiently, I took the rear wheel assembly apart, checked and rechecked my work, and then decided to modify the robot's design. Let me just repeat that last part. I modified the robot's design. If anyone had told me back in 1985 that I would be building, modifying and programming robots, I would have told them they were crackers. Yet here I am.

I'm proud to join the ranks of Bill Gates (rich geek), Leonardo da Vinci (Renaissance geek), Albert Einstein (ubergeek with bad hair) and countless others throughout history who have flown their geek flag proudly. My husband is a video geek and my kids are geeks-in-training. Scoff if you will, but the cars we drive, the Internet we surf, the HDTV's we enjoy and the smart phones we can't live without were all designed by a geek somewhere.

And the geeks shall inherit the earth.