I am become frustrate. Rant.

"TheOnelectronic" (theoneelectronic) 11/10/2013 at 19:47 • Filed to: rantlopnik

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I may have mentioned before that I coach a First Lego League robotics team. A team made up entirely of 6-8th grade girls.

Some of them are just painfully dull, but most are very clever. We've managed to go to state several times, though we have yet to even achieve relevance there. We're mostly okay with this because a lot of the successful teams meet year-round, including over the summer, while we only meet thrice a week for 3 months a year.

My fellow coaches and I also suspect the other teams are cheating, because there are limits to what I can believe a middle schooler designed. But that's not really relevant.

My issue is that the girls will not apply themselves.

This is a voluntary thing. They had to sign up for it, and pay money (none of which to me :|) for it. We even made them write essays about why they wanted to join, since last year we had pretty much the entire school join and maybe 5 people who didn't think it was just after-school social club.

Even still, though, It's almost impossible to get them to actually work towards any sort of goal. I think there are a lot of things behind this; they don't have enough confidence in themselves, they legitimately do not understand how legos work as well as someone who grew up building things with them, and they don't properly understand the relation between their effort and our success.

It's not like they don't care. A few of the worst offenders have expressed significant desire to go to state. It's just that they either don't realize they have to apply themselves, or they don't adequately feel like they can make a difference. Most attempts to teach them programming or construction principles have resulted in "But I can't do ____" responses.

Of course, there are also a few who are just plain disruptive. I would really like to just kick them out, but since their parents paid money for it, that would cause a lot of angry people.

More and more, it's looking like one of the teams this year won't even have a working robot by competition. If history is any indication, the last few practices will stretch into and beyond the night and consist of frantic, crazed work.

But I'm tempted to just say no. They always knew how much time they had, and I repeatedly told them that they needed to pick up the pace, but watching One Direction videos on youtube seemed more important, I suppose. After all, we already do far more than coaches are really supposed to in terms of design and programming, but if we retreated to the "hands off" approach FIRST advocates, we would probably never even have a robot at all. Also, I wouldn't be able to play with legos. At least not without people looking at me strangely.

But I won't. I'm pretty sure I'm psychologically incapable of purposefully making somebody sad. And at the end of the day, we'll have built a brand new chassis instead of just reusing the one we've used for the last 5 years, implemented daring and challenging propulsion solutions (Tracks!), and have a robot designed*, built, and programmed* by the actual team members. Maybe we won't do well at competition, but we won't have a monolithic cube of legos that obliterates the field accomplishing every task in one run through highly convoluted and intricate systems that would make Rube Goldberg proud.

That's an early prototype of our robot at the top, there. This year's challenge has a rather high-value obstacle section, so we figured we'd go all-out and use the tracks to dominate the obstacles. Unintentional features: if the robot flips over, it will continue driving in the same direction just fine, since the entire body is within the tracks. It can, also, actually climb over the 2x4 walls and fall to its death. This is something we have to watch. Please ignore how chaotic my desk is.

*Designs may be highly influenced by me. They're middle-schoolers, not engineers. They need guidance.

Tom McParland > TheOnelectronic 11/10/2013 at 19:52

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Wow...middle schoolers, bless you man. I teach high-schoolers and would never venture down to middle school. Those kids are nuts. But kudos to you for volunteering your time to at least try to help these young people. :)

doodon2whls > TheOnelectronic 11/10/2013 at 19:53

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More and more, it seems that it is more difficult to engage the youngins'... I know it was hard for me to focus when I was a teen, but I was at least doing constructive stuff like fixing lawnmowers, motorcycles, cars, and building lego contraptions... All things mechanical, really.

BTW, I lol'd at your desk with the RedBull cans all over it... Where is the Vodka ? In a drawer ?

pdthedeuce > TheOnelectronic 11/10/2013 at 19:54

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man , I give you lots of credit for even trying .

Ramblin Rover - The Vivisector of Solihull > TheOnelectronic 11/10/2013 at 19:57

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watching One Direction videos on youtube

Seriously, though I'd say time to crack the whip is now, and "made your bed => lie in it" is if that doesn't work. Also, possible to recruit any Lego-building siblings they have to skirt (hurr) the rules there?

Also, this is one reason I seriously don't mind Lego doing the girly theme series. If our culture is going to emphasize flowery pink stuff, there might as well be some damn Lego in it.

TheBloody, Oppositelock lives on in our shitposts. > TheOnelectronic 11/10/2013 at 19:59

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You're a better man than me, I'd let them fail and then spend a hour afterwards detailing every reason why it was their fault... I'd be a terrible teacher.

GhostZ > TheOnelectronic 11/10/2013 at 20:01

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Be glad society exists. Otherwise, half of your class would be eaten by lions by now.

Somethingwittyer likes noisy > TheOnelectronic 11/10/2013 at 20:06

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I'm part of my robotics club in High School, and we took 1 and a half hours trying to move the placement of the battery and most of the time do nothing. How you manage to get anything done with middle schoolers is anyone's guess.

TheOnelectronic > GhostZ 11/10/2013 at 20:06

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Oh hell no. I'd feel sorry for those lions. They'd be sassed so hard their manes would recede. HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE WRATH OF A MIDDLE-SCHOOL GIRL?

It is terrible.

TheOnelectronic > Somethingwittyer likes noisy 11/10/2013 at 20:08

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I did FRC in High School, and although there was a lot of idle time, it was a labor-intensive enough thing that most of the people who were there wanted to be there and wanted to robot. Also, there was enough to do for everyone to have a job. FLL just doesn't present those opportunities. Only two people at most can be working on the robot, maybe two people program, and the other 4-8 just gossip.

TheOnelectronic > TheBloody, Oppositelock lives on in our shitposts. 11/10/2013 at 20:13

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I'm tempted to do this every day, but I also realize that they're kids. They don't have the kind of resilience to withstand criticism from an "adult" (oh god that's terrifying), and it wouldn't do any good at all. I think they know what's going wrong, it's just convincing them that they, each individually, have the agency to change it.

TheOnelectronic > Ramblin Rover - The Vivisector of Solihull 11/10/2013 at 20:16

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One of the girls two years ago went on a little mini rant when she saw the pink girly legos. (These are dumb! You can't even make anything with them!) It was wonderful. I have my own ideas about girls and legos, but that's for another discussion.

While we possibly could, I think the problem is what they think they can do versus what they actually can do. If you can present it properly, they can come up with really clever solutions to things. My job amongst the coaching staff is more or less to translate theoretical ideas into Legos.

TheBloody, Oppositelock lives on in our shitposts. > TheOnelectronic 11/10/2013 at 20:17

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That's why you are a good teacher, I'm just an asshole who may or may not derive some small pleasure from crushing their spirits lol.

TheOnelectronic > doodon2whls 11/10/2013 at 20:19

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Oh man, you think the redbull is a choice.

It's not so much that they're doing unconstructive things as it is that they just legitimately can't ALL be working at once. The robot isn't big enough for more than two people at a time to be fiddling with it. I definitely don't think it's some generation gap thing. They can focus and work really hard, they just need a clearly defined purpose, and I can't adequately have 4 groups working in parallel; my brain just starts to smolder.

They mostly have a great intuition for mechanical problem solving (aka engineering), they just don't know how to implement it.

TheOnelectronic > Tom McParland 11/10/2013 at 20:28

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The worst part is that this school clumps 6,7, and 8th grade together, so you've got kids on both sides of adolescence trying to coexist.

That said, it's a private school with a focus on math and science mainly attended by professors' kids, so it's a lot better than, for instance, my middle school. It's cool to walk in and see models of various elements that they made, or hear them complain about their homework in JAVA PROGRAMMING, which I would have killed to take in 7th grade.

The potential is there, it's just a matter of getting them to believe that they can do it.

f86sabre > TheOnelectronic 11/10/2013 at 20:30

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So, basically, you have found what teachers and researchers have been talking about for years. Getting/keeping girls interested in STEM related subjects and tasks is hard. Keep at it though. It is really important stuff. I'm sure there are a few in the group who get it. Make sure they are getting he attention they deserve and not just the ones you have to keep prodding. There is a good chance that there will be at least one student on your team who will look at this as a pivotal experience down the road.

TheOnelectronic > f86sabre 11/10/2013 at 20:33

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I'm firmly of the belief that it all comes down to preconceptions.

Girls don't play with trucks because girls don't play with trucks, ad nauseum.

I don't think it's specifically STEM, though. It's really a pretty tight timetable, and the school doesn't really give us enough time. Add to that that the competition only exists in the states of "far away" and "oh crap next week", and it's just hard to get anything done quickly and without the principle of "path of least effort."

Tom McParland > TheOnelectronic 11/10/2013 at 20:35

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Motivation is and always will be the million dollar question in education. I spent my entire Master's degree trying to crack that nut (only scratched the surface) and would have continued to pursue it if I finished my Doctorate. But I did find some great progress in Self Determination Theory...a nice intro to this approach could be found in Daniel Pink's book "Drive"...he does a great Ted Talk that is easy to find on YouTube. You might find it interesting for your dilemma.

Cajun Ginger > TheOnelectronic 11/10/2013 at 20:59

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You rock. When do we get to hear your ideas about girls and Legos?

This woman grew up playing with hot wheels, Legos and Star Wars figures.

My kid sister played with my little pony while I played with the above things.

Biostar01 > TheOnelectronic 11/10/2013 at 22:39

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I am an avid FLLer (I'm 12 [eigth-grader], remember?), and I completely understand your pain.

One question though - why are you using EV3?

I use NXT and it seems to me that it works better. Don't use tracks (they're too slow) or the big wheels (too inaccurate) , use 2 medium drive wheels in the front and a free-pivoting third (small) wheel in the back.

You guys have the Nature's Fury challenge, right? How are you doing?

Since I've graduated from my school's official FLL grade limit (4th-5th grade students only), I help the coordinator teach the class. I basically have the entire board figured out, while the little children are sometimes doing reasonably well. If only I could make my own team and beat them all.

Ferrero1911 > TheOnelectronic 11/11/2013 at 01:21

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I wish I could have done something like that when I was in middle school. My school pretty much spent 3 years making sure you knew how to take notes, except for the one science class where we got to build rockets.

As a girl who would have loved to make lego robots I think it's really cool what you're doing. I think it's hard for girls in middle school to get away from their social safety net to do something nerdy even if they do think it's cool. Are there any cool videos of what other teams have done in past years? Maybe that will inspire them while still letting them watch youtube.

TheOnelectronic > Ferrero1911 11/11/2013 at 05:23

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Sadly, they usually just find videos like this:

And then just say "Well, we could never do that!"

TheOnelectronic > Biostar01 11/11/2013 at 05:32

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We keep half-joking about a "Coach team" where we can just go all-out and see how ridiculous we can make things.

Why EV3? Because it's new. Also, being able to use gyro sensors and the added functionality of the new brick is nice. Especially using the tracks, which have a lot of slip when turning, the gyro sensor is going to be very important. And if the new servo motors are at all more accurate than the old ones, I will be so happy. Complex line following/squaring is more or less beyond them, so we have to use a lot of dead reckoning to get around.

The tracks are slower due to the small sprocket wheels, yes, but we were usually only ever running at half power with the medium wheels anyway. If we really need speed, we can just run full bore and it cooks along pretty fast. The main advantage of the tracks was that they allowed us to have a robot that was not very tall, but could still easily get over the obstacles. We used the 2 medium wheels + Caster for the past... five years? and while it worked, the girls were just rebuilding the same chassis every year and weren't really thinking about why they were doing it. Also, that chassis we used had the motors under the brick, and with the airplane's string this year, height is a concern. One team is doing wheels at brick level with the ball bearing caster in back, one is doing tracks. The girls decided on using tracks mostly because not many teams do. They wanted to try something different, and we decided that being able to easily and reliably cross the obstacles was worth a rather large amount of easy points.

One of the biggest challenges with our team is that all the coaches are university students. This is my third year and I'm the most senior coach. There isn't really a knowlege base that builds up over time like there might be if it was being coached by a faculty member.

Chteelers > TheOnelectronic 11/11/2013 at 09:10

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You are attempting to teach engineering and Legos to middle-school girls? You must be a Zen Master of Patience. Keep up the good work. You didn't think this was going to be easy, did you?

TheOnelectronic > Chteelers 11/11/2013 at 09:12

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Oh, the engineering and legos part is easy. The oh-god-why-are-you-wearing-Lucy's-shoes part is the hard one.

Biostar01 > TheOnelectronic 11/11/2013 at 18:07

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Yup. I see your point. We were mechanically building that chassis too, but since we have less than no funding, we're stuck with NXT and have to use that setup because it's most effective. Putting flat tracks on the same chassis design was insanely slow with the tracks. We were having airplane string issues too, so we changed the order in which we did things. I looked at the tracks, and yeah, those slippery panes are really bugging me. I like your angled caterpillar tracks, though, and I can imagine that the EV3 motors would be faster.

A couple years ago (2009, the Smart Move challenge), when I was competing, one of our rival teams had built literally a cube of parts that was pretty much exactly the size of the regulation box. It would move a little and it had extending parts that would do the actions. It was dominating until one of the parts jammed and it basically disintegrated. We ended up getting 2nd place overall and first in engineering challenge and subject analysis.

In the 2010 Body Forward challenge, a disaster happened to us in the third round. We had two robots that we alternated rounds with. One robot was with us, while the other one was in a bag at the base camp. While we were out doing the second round, some hooligans came and switched around the servo wires so left was the right output and vice versa. That ruined us. We got 6th overall.

Good luck to your team! When are they competing and how well-prepared do you think they are?

TheOnelectronic > Biostar01 11/11/2013 at 19:38

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Ooooh yes. The "fortress bots" as we call them. They've introduced quite a few rules with Nature's Fury that seem to be aimed against those. Base is now about half as tall, and you get penalties if you leave pieces of robot on the mat.

I believe our regional is Dec. 6, and we're pretty not prepared at all. Like usual.