[Wetzel]

For this year, I respond with "Awesome! We started with a group of kids, all but one had never built a robot before, and built a robot that did exactly what we wanted it to do and then kept working at it until it did more than we wanted. I started the season having to give step-by-step directions for everything and am now at the point where they are not satisfied with functional and are thinking about how to make it better. They went from responding to a judges question "Tell me about your robot" with a shy "It drives and balances on the bridge" to a confident conversation about the abilities of the robot and the iterations we went through to get there. We have students now talking about starting and mentoring FLL teams at elementary schools in our pyramid as a long term recruiting method.

Oh yeah, we won the DC regional and qualified for the Championships. We didn't win on the field there, but the robot and kids kept on getting better. One of my favorite seasons yet, and definitely a successful one.


Wetzel