Lego Update!

I was going to post about Jabber Jaws birthday that happened a few weeks back. Or the football super bowl his team played in... but lost. Unfortunately those posts and pictures will have to wait until Lego Day passes. Actually it's not called Lego Day, it's Lego Robotics and my two oldest boys are involved. They have been working with 4 other members of their team, and parent coaches so much this week! Here is an idea of what they have accomplished over the last several months and through this week.

• They have almost completed the programming of a Lego Mindstorm robot. It has to do 4 mission completing a variety of tasks to earn points. Some tasks involve picking up loops, knocking over pylons etc etc. Our team will be competing with about 63 other teams from around our state. How is that for crazy???


• This year's First Lego League theme is called Smart Moves, and is all about the ways in which we move through life. Transportation, like walking boating, driving, flying, biking, etc etc. The kids had to pick a mode of transportation and identify a problem with it. They had to define the area they would focus on.... global, regional local or whatever, and then research problems and work on a solution.


• The kids also had to come up with a presentation based on their research. They did a power point presentation, all by themselves! These are 9-12 yr olds here! I saw a flyer they created, and some of the power point and I was impressed.


• They had to come up with a team name and design a logo.


• They came up with a giveaway that had to do with their team and project. The team voted on trail mix, and so yours truly just made over 200 snack size ziploc bags of trail mix. Plus labeled it all with our logo using Word and Avery labels. (I was impressed with myself and my outstanding computer skills that only took me 3 hours to figure out.... yes that long! Then I saw the power point presentation, and my self esteem plummeted further!) LOL!

The competition is this Saturday. We're not quite ready... and it's almost our entire teams first time doing this...... but everyone is set to have fun no matter what happens, so it should be a good experience!