Tidewater Lego League Expo

We had a blast. The expo was run beautifully and thoughtfully by Erin Trzell and we thank her and her team for hosting us!

Pictures and video:

The kids presenting to the judge:





Demonstrating to another parent:



Little sister making a Lego car:



Our team won the "Inquiring Minds" award because they are so awesome!



Here's the "High Five Ceremony" where they got their ribbons:



Another great day for the Legodiles. My favorite team. :)

Legodiles at the Junior First Lego League Expo in Harrisonburg VA

The Legodiles attended the expo without one of our members, but those who were able to go had a wonderful time. Here are some pictures:

The team with their display and model:



Benny explaining solar power to the judge:



The team getting their trophies:



Happy team:



And in the van on the way home:



Sweet, smart little boys. They were charming, interesting, brilliant little people all day and we richly enjoyed the experience. :) Our next Expo will be in January with the full complement of members. We can't wait to show Shira how much fun it is.

How to Build Gracious Collaborators

Our Lego League team is heading for the Expo in December. Today the model is done. The offshore platform, the gas processing plant, the gas company, the kitchen. And the pipes are in place. What's completely amazing is that all four children worked harmoniously on the same model. They did not fight over who got what partner, who worked on what structure, or what color bricks to use for the countertop. They were absolutely great. I was so proud, I almost exploded.

How was this accomplished? Well, the children we had to work with are exceptionally wonderful. They are all brilliant, opinionated, imaginative little people, and they do get on each other's nerves. When one of them gets a strong vision, they get very determined to follow it specifically, and it's hard for them to accommodate a partner. I did a little work to help them find their gracious behavior.

From the moment I knew that they were going to be working together all on the same 15 by 15 inch plate, I was worried about the conflict. So, for the last two meetings we worked in teams of two and practiced building the major structures: the kitchen and the offshore platform. First, both teams built the kitchen. Then, the next team, both teams built the platform. Breaking the team into partners for two builds meant that there were only two little heads bumping over that 15 by 15 plate, instead of four. Which gave us time to practice our gracious collaboration.

I am all about the vocabulary. I introduced the concept of "gracious collaboration" and dramatized, in a silly way, both examples of good collaboration and examples of rotten, dysfunctional collaboration. I had the children brainstorm situations that might arise in the building process where conflict could develop. First I demonstrated extremely ungracious behavior (which made them laugh) and we decided on gracious things to say. We wrote these down on the chalkboard. The children came up with three conflicts: two people want to do the same part of the work, the partners disagree about whether an idea is good or not, and the partners disagree about what to do next. They decided on three gracious utterances. The first two are ways to avoid conflict, and the third is a way to respond to someone else's graciousness:



"I hear your idea, but may I make a suggestion?"

"I defer to you."

"Thank you, dear partner. Let's do your idea next!"



We agreed that no one person should constantly be in charge of graciousness -- that it should switch by turns between the partners. If child A defers this time, then child B will defer next time. We talked about how you can only graciously defer if you trust that your partner will also graciously defer when it's his/her turn.



When we started the build, I had a sheet of little stickers in my hand. Every time I heard one of the children say something on the list, or some other improvised polite-itude, I would shriek with delight and gallop over and put a sticker on that child's hand. I didn't say it was a competition, and we didn't have a winner, but they did want to get a lot of stickers. And they did. I will shamelessly admit to making a big fat deal out of it -- at one point I clasped my forehead and claimed to be crying with joy over the politeness and the glorious teamwork.


After the practice, I was impressed with the children, but today was the toughest test. They passed with flying colors. I never would have thought that four children could be so nice to each other. Collaboration has been achieved. Go Legodiles!

Here's a video of the collaboration practice:

My True Screw: A Physics Song for Learning about Screws

Another song about physics for elementary school!

Here's a link to the song sheet as a PDF:

Here are the lyrics:

MY TRUE SCREW

A screw is a shaft with a helical groove
Or thread wound around it in a helical way
You use a screwdriver to make the screw move
Righty tighty, lefty loosey,” as Joshua would say

Chorus:
Screw Screw Screw!
Are you a true simple machine?Or are you just another helical inclined plane?

A screw translates torque into linear force
When you turn it, that’s torque but it doesn’t just spin
It also goes straight down — that’s linear of course
“What goes around goes down!” say the Silverberg twins

Chorus

The drive of the screw is the slot in its top
Where you put the screwdriver to turn it around
It might be a cross, a line, square, or teardrop
“A proper tool for every job,” as Benny has found.

Chorus

Have you heard of Archimedes
He perfected a wonderful screw
To lift water or an object up
Like a golf ball, or a hot turnip

A screw inside a pipe
Is a screw of a mechanical type
A screw with a point on one end
Is a fastener screw, my dearest friend

Note: There are specific names in the song, which obviously would have to be changed to your children's names. To replace "The Silverberg Twins" with one name (if you don't have twins in your group) just say "says Rudolph again" or whatever name you need.

And here's the video, in which I completely bargled the lyrics, but as long as I have children to jump on my head and correct me, who cares:

Lego My Pulley

Last week our Lego League team learned about pulleys. Pulleys are apparently simple machines that you use to make things lighter, so your little scale hickamajig reads THREE instead of SIX. Getting the scale thingy down to three is exciting and means that you win the game of pulleys! The three moms in our Lego League are open-minded but basically clueless when it comes to machinery. Fortunately we can read and are staying a lesson ahead of our six-and-seven-year-olds. Also fortunately, our six-and-seven-year-olds are happy to inform us of every little thing that we don't already know, six or seven times each.

Here's Benny stretching his pulley cord thingy around his pulley wheelie thingies:



They tell me that if you want the pulley wheels to go opposite directions, like gears do, you have to twist the cord between them. Or something. Is it tiresome when I go on and on about "thingies" and "whatsits"? I'm not being coy, I promise you. I genuinely am that blunt-headed about physics. It all takes me back to that classroom during my last semester as a chemistry major, when I was taking something called "University Physics," an honors class with all the smarty math people that I was trying to hang with at the time. Shortly thereafter, I switched over to hanging with the smarty literature people, and felt much better. The math people always kind of looked at me in a vague, kind, lordly way. Well, here I am with physics again. Celebrating another day of living.

I like to build dog houses with my Legos. Is there any important principle to be learned from constructing a red and blue dog house with a front and back door?

Here's Ben demonstrating his lifting device:



Ben and Benny building away:



Here's the other half of the team, heads bowed over their pulley projects:



This week's assignment was to build a fishing pole, which Benny did this evening with Dan. They made one with one pulley, two pulleys, three pulleys, and you know, the darn Lego fish weight got lighter and lighter to wind up with each additional pulley. It was amazing.

So, does this mean that if I make myself a pulley necklace, I will see some results on the scale? I bet I could fit twenty five Lego pulleys onto a stylish choker. A few sequins, a dangling brick or two, who's with me? Let's accessorize our way to glamorous supermodel status. It's only a Lego (pulley) away.

Meanwhile, Benny will now demonstrate the more practical uses of pulleys: feeding worms to the fish in Broad Bay.

Junior First Lego League

Can you feel the excitement crackling in the air? As I write this, it's 11:59AM, on the day that the 2007 challenge is released on the First Lego League web site. All over the world, nerdy little children who understand how to program legobots to perform tasks are huddled over their computers, refreshing the page every five seconds, so they can be the first to know. Okay, maybe not, but in a few minutes, this nerdy 35-year-old is going to scamper over and see what it is.

Benny and some of his little friends have organized into a Junior First Lego League team, this is a 6-9 year old version of the league for older kids. The older kids have to build a robot, and take it to a tournament where it is judged and competes against other robots. The junior version have, reportedly, a less difficult challenge, and a more open-ended kit to work with.

We had our first meeting yesterday. When I arrived at Shez's house, I had brought with me a few building kits, Mega-Bloks Dragons kits that Ahno had given Benny for Christmas, years ago, that we had never opened because first they were too old for him and then he had the Imaginext castle stuff... anyway I had the BRILLIANT idea that the kids could practice teamwork and get their Lego on (yes, I know, Mega-Bloks are anathema to Lego, like matter and anti-matter, they cause tears in the universe, but whatever) by doing these kits.

We ran into a couple of issues:

1. The kits were hard to put together. Not just hard to figure out the directions (although that was part of it) but hard to physically get the pieces to fit together. I don't know if this was years in the laundry room or if the pieces never did go easily together or what. But, it was an issue.

2. We had a personality conflagration, between two of the little boys. I won't name names but one of the names rhymes with Penny. Both of these two wanted to be in charge of the kit they were working on together, neither wanted to give up the instruction sheet, and they got into a big semantic argument about who had told whom that they "didn't know everything" and who was a "smartypants" and what it meant to be uninformed but wise, etc. So. We decided that these two are going to have a Lego challenge beyond the robot building -- they're going to have to figure out how to get along with each other and be a team. Which is a good lesson.

3. We adults had a beast of a time thinking up a name for the kids. The children came up with Legodiles, having rejected my more austere suggestion, Legotorians. So they're the Legodiles, and now I'm working on making them a logo, a web page, a CafePress store, and everything else that a group of silly children needs to be happy.

We never did get those lousy castle sets put together during the meeting, but Benny finished one of them this morning and here's the result:



Pretty cool! He and Sadie have been happily playing with it for about two hours. Time to break up the party and get back to the multiplication by 9s. Enough fun! There is no fun in homeschool! No fun! ;) Now speaking of total seriousness and devotion to rigorous study of relevant topics, I'm going to go peek at the challenge about making colorful robots that save the world.