Quote:
Originally Posted by Ogre
I just watched the video and read the missions for this year.
It seems like an awful lot for 5th graders to understand, but that's my first impression. My FLL team surprises me every year.
The only thing I can say for sure is that FLL gets harder and more complicated every year.
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That's always my first reaction every year (I mean... Nanotechnology? I'm in college and I can't make heads or tails of that, how are middle schoolers supposed to?!?!) but then the kids never cease to amaze me. At first I was thinking, "Well gee, maybe I just have an exceptional bunch of kids that I'm working with," and while that's true, every team that I saw as a judge astounded me with their creativity and their ability to pick up on such difficult concepts. One of the teams I worked with came up with nanobraces using carbon strands and nanochips to numb pain and track the braces progress. On my other team, a 7th grader came up with a comparison between 2 diseases, one in cows and one in humans, and hypothesized that the same medicine could be delivered in buckyballs, and all they have to do is move the ligons to correspond with the different disease. I wouldn't have been able to come up with that, no matter how much research I did. These kids are smart, creative, resourceful-- That's why they do FIRST!