Finishing up last school year

I had a little extra time today so I think I will catch up a little on the blog. I am going back to the last few weeks of school. Noah got involved in a club called Lego Mindstorms. There were 2 fathers who worked at Boeing who volunteered to run a club that taught kids to design, build, and program robots. They worked in teams and Noah's partner in crime was Wyatt. The 5th grade robots were programmed to run through a maze. The 6th grade robots were sumo. That means they were programmed to push the other robot off the edge of the platform. It was really fun to watch them spend 2 months going after school twice a week (sometimes more) learning the programming and building their robots. Then they'd try it in the maze and tweek it if needed. They had a deadline of 2 weeks before the competition. If they couldn't get their robot to successfully complete the maze at the school they couldn't go to the competition. Luckily, they got theirs to work and got to take their robot to the Lagoon State Physics Day to compete. I was really proud of him for sticking to it and getting to the competition. It was a lot of hours and lots of frustration that he had to push through learning this new skill.

Part of the competition was talking to a judge and explaining what you did to create and program your robot. It was to prove that the kids did their own work and not the adults.

The whole group of kids from Jenny P. Stewart. This is both 5th and 6th graders.

Noah working feverishly on his robot