On Coaching

I would really like to write about my 3-year coaching experience working with these smart kids since they were 9 years old. But I don't know where to start.

Perhaps I can start with myself.

How did I get started?

I brought Ida to Intel Open House in April 2005. We visited a booth from ORTOP. Ida was fascinated by programming and getting a robot to move around. She said she would like to start a FLL team. In September of that year, Another parent and I approached the coach of the existing team from the same elementary school separately and we both decided to form a new team. Words got out and we quickly grew to 11 kids, all 4th graders at that time.

Managing a dozen of kids is no small task. We had lots of problems sharing computers, robots, ideas, and almost everything. We also noticed that some kids were less interested in doing real work while their parents wanted them to learn. This is a good lesson for us. We should not rely on the words from their parents about their interest and enthusiam in Lego Robotics.

To avoid having too many parents and too many kids, we asked each kid to write an essay about why they would like to join the team in 2006. We also got more parents involved and we formed 2 teams of about 6 kids each. The experienced kids stayed on the same team to become the Nanites while the new kids formed their own team so they were qualified for Rookies Award.

Each kid on the Nanites team has a robot and access to a portable computer for programming. That turns out to be a very good idea. We built multiple robots for competition and had a hot spare whenever we participated in a tournament.

The problems in 2006 were mostly related to resolving conflicts among kids, and among parents too. The most difficult thing is to figure out a role for each individual kid and parent so we could co-exist together. We learned a lot about team work and gracious professionalism.

Many kids would like to return to FLL again in 2007. I just could not take all of them. We encouraged a few parents to form their own team as their kids already learned a lot from being the Nanites in 2006. We took a couple of new kids from the other team hoping that new ideas as a result of diversification would help the team.

The 2007 season is not over yet. Stay tuned.