Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion FLL= First Lego League team

Hello- I'm wondering if anyone has experience being on or running a FLL (First Lego League) team. We are just starting a team and I've offered to be a coach! Thanks for any information!

DD10 joined her school's FLL robotics club (they meet and play with the robot/missions but don't compete) last year, and moved up to the competitive team this year. I got my first look at what the heck it was all about when they competed, then let my DD give me a quick tour of the programming tools, and joined the team as a mentor.

I think it's a great program. Anytime I've looked at a programming manual, my eyes have glazed over. But, give me a real problem to solve, and it suddenly gets interesting. FLL provides exactly that... real, interesting problems that the kids get to solve. There's no better teacher.

In order to hit the ground running, I'd advise you to view some Youtube videos of FLL competition entries, to get an idea of what they're up to. Also, read everything you're supplied when you join, because there are a lot of complicated rules for competitions, and they encourage out-of-the-box thinking by saying, basically, if there's no rule against what you want to do, go for it.

The programming tool is pretty simple... a GUI interface with drag-and-drop blocks that get connected together by "wires." And yet, I've seen enterprise software development kits that looked pretty much the same, so don't let that fool you... these kids may not be doing so through a text editor, but they are definitely programming.

I found that the kids needed some guidance in how to organize their approach to a problem, shown how the robot can be used to take precise measurements, and did not find conditional processing or programming loops to be intuitive at all, so those needed some explanation. Otherwise, they pretty much took to it like ducks to water.

My major job was to watch their programs run, and act as a debugger, because they could often tell what was happening, but they didn't always know why, or if they knew why, they didn't have any ideas on how to approach a solution. So I would ask them what they saw, and then I'd share what I saw it doing, and we'd talk about different ways about how, now that we'd defined the problem, it could be resolved. What I noticed was that, after we'd done this exercise a few times, they started noticing the imperfections on their own, and became more independent of my input for solutions. Practice solving problems leads to problem solving skills... who knew??

If the kids are serious about competing, then:

1) All of the programs need to eventually run on one robot at competition, but we found that having only one or two working robots for the team led to a lot of wasted time by the kids, hampering development.

2) The teams that did best had the most hours of practice, and had the most adult mentors. Our team met one hour a week and had two adults in the room. One of the teams that beat us met for several hours a week, and each kid had a parent with them.

Of course, getting caught up in WINNING! can also mean the adults take over and ruin everything for the kids, so beware. You want this to be child-led. We didn't touch the programming environment or the robot, unless there seemed to be a technical issue outside of what they were doing, or unless we were demonstrating something.

My DD9 was on a team for the first time this past season and found it to be really fun. I was actually very surprised by how calm she was during competition. The thing I like about FLL is that it can be about more than just programming with the Core Values and Project judging as well. My daughter's team had to work a lot on how to be a team. There is a place for everyone on a team with planning fundraisers and making posters and working on attachments and programming, etc. I definitely agree with Dude about having more than one robot. My daughter's team only had one last year and there was a lot of downtime for some kids, which did cause problems. They're getting an additional robot and computer for next season. The coach was new herself last year but has really learned a lot about how to improve for next season. It definitely helps to have other parents be a part of the process, even if just for making sure the kids are staying on task. It can be tough with a large team, I'd say 5 to 7 would be more ideal, we had 10 last year. Good luck and have fun.

My daughter was on a FLL team last year and it was really fun! My dh was in charge of taking her to the meetings and talking programming with her, I ended up being the "spirit mom" for the big meet.
My advice is to have a parent take over the spirit stuff, helping the kids make signs and to dress up funny for the events. This will free you up to get deep into the programming while making sure that the kids have a silly time too!

Much like coaching a sport team, things can get sticky. A friend volunteered herself and her computer scientist husband to coach a team and they were amazingly successful but she quit after a year and I was horrified by how other parents treated her and her husband (just so happens they were all parents of gifted children but I don't think there is a causation).

If you can pick and choose team members, I'd choose carefully.

My dh and I mentored a team when our kids were in elementary school - there are a lot of up sides to FLL, but there were also things that were frustrating for our children and for us as coaches (from our side, the frustration had to do mostly with school policy rather than FLL league). I'll just mention the challenges we ran into so you can know to watch out for them:

1) Our kids were interested in FLL for the robotics, and they loved that part of it. They thought the team challenge part (where you have to complete a non-robotics challenge together as a team) was ok, but didn't see it as exciting enough to be worth being on a team for. They weren't terribly interested in the project presentation and would have been much happier if they'd never had to work on it at all. In other words, my kids wanted to do robotics and only robotics.

2) Our school required us to let any student who was interested to participate, and we weren't allowed to remove anyone from the group for any reason (ANY reason). This meant we ended up with a large group of students, some of whom were very motivated, many of whom were signed up because it was free, it was after school, and therefore put those two together and you have free childcare 1-2 days per week. We also had a few kids who signed up because their friends were there. What that meant as mentors was that our time (mentor time) was spent not just on mentoring but also on a lot of crowd-control and babysitting kids who had no interest in either robotics or the team project.

3) Our school did not share information from children's 504 plans or IEPs with the adult mentors (we did have a sponsor teacher who should have had the information but it was never clear to us that she had any knowledge of it). I personally am torn on whether or not that's info I'd want another parent to have if it was my child, but it did, quite honestly, cause us some challenges which could have had not-so-great outcomes. I don't want to go into the details of other children's business on a public forum, but the issues revolved around children with behavioral challenges which we weren't aware of the root cause of, and hence I, as an adult in charge, addressed the students in a way that would have been appropriate for the behavior coming from a neurotypical child but not for the situation with each specific child with the 504/IEP.

Other than those three things, it was all around a good experience for us, and even though my kids didn't like the project I thought it was an ok thing to include - just a bit of a gotcha for kids who are really going into it mostly for the robotics.

Best wishes,

polarbear

I have coached FLL for the last two years, and I also coach/mentor an FRC team (the high school robotics competition team also through FIRST).

I have a few suggestions, but also a few questions for you:
What grades are the kids in that will be on your team? How many will you have on the team? (To actually compete and have a chance to go to worlds there can be a maximum of 10 kids on the team)
Does your group already have the Lego Mindstorm kit?
Have you reached out to the regional FIRST coordinator in your area? They typically do rookie coach orientation and training in the early fall.

I had 10 kids on my team both years, ranging from 4th through 8th grade and it was too many kids. The most productive meetings we had were when there were 6 kids there - regardless of which 6 it was. There were also some problems with the difference in maturity between the 4th and 8th graders - although the older kids were tolerant of the younger ones, it was obvious at times that they were ready to scream at them.
My first year, we pretty much ignored the project and core values parts of FLL and the team later regretted that decision when we got to competition and had a pretty successful robot, but we couldn't advance because we had terrible project and core values scores. This past year though, we split up our meetings to be more balanced and we ended up not only getting to the regional championships, but also won an award for our project as well as our robot design!

If you want more details, please pm me, I would be happy to help you out in anyway. FIRST is such an amazing organization it is well worth developing the kids' interest starting at a young age because the stuff they get to do with FIRST as they get older is life changing!

My husband and I have coached a team for three years, and it's a great program. There's a lot of good advice above. A few things that we've learned:

- We prefer smaller teams. Aim for 5-7 kids who want to be there. With 9-10 kids, it gets chaotic and one of the coaches ends up doing nothing but babysitting, keeping a few kids out of hair of the kids who are actually doing something.
- A mix of younger and older can work very well, but I agree with Kerry that the older ones only have so much tolerance. One year, we had to diplomatically suggest that one little guy wasn't ready. He was a great kid, but he was driving the other kids crazy. Other young ones have worked out just fine.
- We like to have two meetings every week--one after-school meeting dedicated to the Project and one weekend meeting dedicated to the Robot Game.
- If possible, find a place where you can leave the table set up.
- We like to start the season with a build-the-robot-game-models session. Everyone can participate and it's exciting to see the models and the table come together. After the meeting, double-check the models to make sure that they're built and working correctly.
- When we started, the Project was a pain, an afterthought. However, if the kids choose the right topic, it can be as much or more fun than the Robot Game.

It's a lot of work, but it's definitely worthwhile. Have fun!