So after a parent meeting and three team meetings – it was time to really taste the Body Forward challenge. We set up 4 stations around the house. The Missions, The Project, The Pit and Programming.  After splitting into three teams, each team would spend about 20 minutes in each area with some minimal instructions to figure out. The Missions Station will be the highlight of next week, so these were just on display.

The Project:  The Brain. The team has narrowed down our body part to The Brain.  This week – I had the team mold the brain out of play dough and then draw the brain on the white board. They were to put up anything they researched about what the brain actually did. What is it tied to? What tie, if broken, would we want to focus on? What part of the brain would we want to focus on?  We had to cut our meeting short this week, so we didn’t get a team discussion after the sub teams – so I’m excited to hear what they came up with.

The Pit – This is the first week that many of the team members had ever laid hands on the NXT. We printed off a 15 minute challenge from Constructopedia to have the team members construct. They each got to build an operating robot and then disassemble it. They started cheering and timing each other to see how fast they could build. My goal in the next couple of weeks is to have all of the team members really secure in the construction of the Techtronic pieces.

         
Now that the older sisters have been hanging out a bit – they have decided First Lego League is for them. 🙂 I’m so excited to have them on board!

The third station is Programming – We went through the tutorials on the NXT Software CD. I also took this time to go over all of the sensors. The boys VERY quickly caught on. I am glad that they will know to click on the red Techtronic part on the upper right hand of the screen if they want to investigate a new command. 🙂 The last sub team through this station saved their work and then downloaded the program into the NXT brick. Worked like a charm!

Next week we will split into Two Subteams.  Missions and Project.  We are up to 10 team members now. YIKES! So we’ll have half of them really pour over the individual missions and while the other half narrows down the “problem” for the project.  We’ll switch after 45 minutes. My folks will be here next Friday and I’m excited for them to see all team members at work!

As always, if you have any Rookie First Lego League tips or pieces of advice – I’d love to hear it!  If you have any tips for the team members for the Brain – I”d pass them along as well.