Creating an After School Lego Program

[Qbot2640]

Originally Posted by mathking

I have run such a program at my son's school. A couple pieces of advice. The younger the kids, the shorter the sessions. With any group of kids you will reach a tipping point in their attention spans. If the sessions need to be longer from a schedule standpoint, build in a free play break in the middle.

As for what to do, I had pretty good success using tasks from old FLL challenges. It was easy to get the pieces for one or two tasks from a given challenge, and then the kids could spend anywhere from one session to three sessions working toward solving that challenge. I always started with simple tasks to get them used to driving, programming, sensing and manipulating. Things like navigating a rectangle, dropping a ball in a bin, touching a wall and coming back to a starting position. Then built up to more complicated tasks. We also had mini competitions such as drag races, pushing competitions or "how far can you throw the ball" competitions.

We ended almost every session with all of the groups demonstrating what they had done and discussing. I had them write down in a notebook what they were going to work on first the next time.

I second all of this. We did a summer program of approximately this same length twice now, and the biggest challenge was session length. The organizers (school) wanted to do a long 5 or 6 hour session for four days. We did 3 hours for five days, and for some kids it was fine - but for others they got off task and started goofing. Shorter session length and more sessions would be much better. One thing I would definitely do is to have the first day just work with plain legos...have them first build something of their own, then perhaps make something that incorporates some movement. From there introduce the mechanical components of the robot parts, and some programming.