With the arrival of fall, we’re welcoming new members and have previous activities to integrate them.
Robot Remote Control Relay:
Setup: Entire team participates, dividing into even groups. Each group has alternating roles of ‘Human driver’ and ‘Robot’.
Safety: ‘Robots’ wear safety glasses with vision obscured by tape. Ensure obstacle course is clear of hazards.
Objective: Human driver gives verbal instructions to their ‘Robot’ to navigate an obstacle course or tasks. Once complete, they switch roles and continue.
Field Reset Crew: A dedicated team to reset obstacles and ensure safety.
Autonomous Challenge Relay:
Setup: Similar to above but without vision obstruction.
Objective: Teams ‘program’ their robot using basic movement instructions (paces, degrees) to autonomously complete the course. Switch roles upon completion.
Engineering Design Challenge:
Setup: Split the team up into small groups and divide out supplies like note cards, paperclips, tape, popsicle sticks, rubber bands, straws, etc. If doing the boat challenge use a deep waterproof tote and use pennies to weigh down the boats.
Objective: Building boats, bridges or towers out of office supplies to go for most weight, tallest, etc. Teams get a limited amount of time for each build session. If you have additional time you do a round two after going over what worked and what didnt and why.
Would love to get your insights on any additional activities or tweaks to make these more engaging!
Also if your team does welcoming games or ice breakers any of those would be gladly welcome!
We had a thanksgiving dinner together last year! Also walking in our town’s homecoming parade and going to off season comps have been some big social events. I’m trying to find some good ice breaker activities for us too right now
Every meeting in the fall starts off with a “question of the day”. We go around the room and every has to stand and practice their presenting skills by saying name, grade, sub team, and answering the question. It gives us a chance to continuously work on things like posture and filler words, while getting them comfortable speaking in front of people - all while getting to know each other!
On our first night of having new students we did a marshmallow spaghetti tower contest. No more than two kids per the same grade on a team… they were given a handful of spaghetti and mini marshmallows, while also receiving a foot of both string and tape, and two jumbo marshmallows one of which had to be on the top of the tower…
The students were given ten minutes to construct and transport their tower to the measuring station… it was really cool to see how some teams spent a few minutes brainstorming and some not, some broke into respective sub teams (tapers, frame makers, ect) while others all built in unison.
Some students went to other teams to see what they were thinking and brought ideas back to their own team… some built from the top down so they knew the top would be sturdy…
In the end the kids had a blast and they learned communication, brainstorming, center of gravity, and robustness concepts… we then compared the towers to different robots they will see…
There all the small robust robots that might not be able to score on the top level but are fast and efficient mid and low, the tall tippy robot that can score high but spends every 6 matches on their side, and lastly the robot that was built well and was beating all the other ones until the students forgot to do maintenance on it and it broke.
It was also cool to see that every single team had their own design further letting the kids know that, just because you think it’s the right design doesn’t mean that it is, and that all designs should be given a fair shot before choosing one.
We held a Super Smash Bros. Tournament to teach the members about alliance selections and playoffs. You set it up to play 3 on 3 and run qualification matches, then they select alliances and compete in the playoffs. We had enough members that we ran 2 “Fields” and then the winners of each field faced off in a best of 3. Only took 2 hours (1 meeting), but it was a blast!
Here are some ideas for a team building done recently. Based on the British TV “game” show Taskmaster. Students were in teams of 3. Bit of chaos (too many students!) but a lot of fun.
I’ve done a fast-food-robot design activity before that the kids really liked. It’s been popular with both middle school and high school students.
Kids sit at desks in a circle, each kid needs a piece of blank paper and something to write with
Introduce the concept that they’re going to be working together to draw a robot that can make a hamburger
First, draw a robot that can take hamburger buns out of the bag and put them on the counter (I forget if I gave them 30s or 60s, but don’t give too much time - it should be quick and impulsive, not something they agonize over)
Pass papers one to the left. Now draw how your robot will cut the tomatos
Pass one to the left. Now draw how that robot will flip the burger patties
etc until you run out of steps for making a burger
The kids have a lot of fun with it, and it gives them a no-stakes environment to practice super-fast brainstorming and get comfortable sharing their ideas.
Make sure to hang their masterpieces up on the wall for the next meeting!
We generally do non-robot things for team building.
The 4th of July parade is always fun.
There is a christmas party with silly gifts.
So far this fall we’ve gone roller skating, and bowling & laser tag.
We’ve talked about skiing/snowboarding/tubing.
We’ve done movie nights and volleyball/soccer in the past.
Cross the River - Get the entire team across the “stream” (room) with limited, movable “stepping stones” - a lot of kids have seen this challenge so limited success. (medium to large group)
Marble Run - Get a marble across the room by each student holding a section of tube (eg cardboard tube, PVC, etc) - bonus if the start and stop are far enough away that students needs to run around to make it work. It can be fun or frustrating depending on your kids and the items. (small to medium group)
Just Out of Reach - Put students inside some designated space (ie circle made of rope) and they have to work together to get items that are outside the circle (put items outside of arm’s reach but not too far). This can be hard to get the distances right and some kids already know the “answer.” (small to medium group)
Zip Zap Zop (or any of the variation) - hard for kids who don’t want to be silly. (medium to large group)
Herding Cats - Give students straws and a variety of rolling objects of different weights (cotton balls, pom poms, ping pong balls, golf balls). Students need to get the objects corralled (center of the table or into a cup off the side of the table) by blowing through the straws. (small to medium group)
Team doodling (attach 4+ strings to a marker, each student holds a string and students work together to draw on a piece of paper). I did this one where we had multiple rounds. One round was to try and draw the FIRST logo, another was creating something that represented the team. Teams gave artist statements justifying why their drawing was actually brilliant - it was hilarious. 10/10 recommend (small groups)
Building related challenges:
Fling a thing (pairs)
Paper airplane challenge (furthest? Longest in the air?) (pairs)
Create a “filter” out of string (and whatever random supplies you want to provide) where students need to block marbles (or other objects) from exiting a sufficiently large pipe/tube. (small group)
Make a functional pair of shoes out of newspaper and tape (someone has to be able to walk around the room and take shoes off without damaging the shoe). I turned this into a whole fashion show with artist statements. Very fun. (pairs)
We did this one Tuesday night and I made a gif of one student in the last section. We used the Red and Blue “Cargo” and the FTCFIRST Tech Challenge orange rings to keep the cargo from rolling around the floor. Low mini pylons are meant to be zigzagged around without being a large tripping hazard like the full size cones. (We also use those for drive practice)
Another fun game in a similar vein is the helium pole. You get a relatively long, relatively light pole (I did this in Scouts BSA so we used a tent pole, but anything will work) and have a bunch of people balance it on their finger tips. First have them try to keep it staying still and then try to move it up/down or other directions.
One of my favorites is a variation of this. Rather than using movable stepping stones, use fixed “stones” and 4x4 “bridges”–works best when you can raise the bridges about 8" off the ground. Depending on how mean you want to be much creativity and teamwork you want to put into this, there’s a few variations both in setup and in play.
Must carry ALL bridges across
Not all bridges are used (really makes previous one annoying)
At least one bridge is used twice
No two bridges are the same length
If you can figure out how to induce some slight instability in the bridges, so much the better (OK, that’s just mean… but it’s definitely workable on the fixed courses I’ve seen with this one)
Dropping a human into the hazard you’re crossing causes them “injury”–or even sends them back to the start
Dropping a bridge into the hazard means either failure or return to start
Add pressure: Time limit.
And yes, I have seen this done with a smaller group. (Scouts, to be fair–and I think we had about 6 people balanced on these things with the smallest group I’ve seen.)
There’s a couple of building challenges I haven’t seen yet.
A) Obscured Building. The plans for a small LEGO structure are off to the side, hidden from the main group. One person at a time can look at the plans. Plans may NOT come back to the group. Build the structure. (Plans are generally a multi-view picture.)
B) Split Building. Also with LEGO (or Duplo). Two teams are asked to build near-identical buildings, in the same room. What neither knows is that the pieces have been mixed up! Some critical pieces for each building are with the other team. And just to make things more interesting, there’s extra pieces that don’t get used too. First one to finish wins… but in order to win, you need to talk to the other team! (Sound familiar, anyone?)
Variation on a name game: Use a small Koosh or similarly-sized ball. Toss at someone while saying their name. They repeat with someone else. Go for speed, following the same person order but scrambling placement or just go for flat out speed. It is POSSIBLE to get this under 1 second… Ain’t sayin’ how, that’s for you lot to figure out.
If you don’t know how to play Signs, learn… then play it a time or two.
Your paper airplane challenge reminds me of a team-building challenge where we split the team into two groups of ~5 kids and gave them the prompt to “build the most realistic bird”. It was open-ended and subjective, and they were limited to only supplies that were already in the robotics room. They had a lot of fun, and it was fascinating to see both groups converge on ideas like “seagulls are the archetypal bird, so the “most realistic bird” would be a seagull”, and “to be the most realistic, it has to fly because that’s what we associate with birds, even though it would be easier to build a realistic kiwi or other flightless bird”. One group decided that gliding like a seagull was more important to realism than looking like a seagull, while the other group went hard on aesthetics and made a ton of little paper feathers for their bird.
