Ac 2007-2224: Mentoring First Lego League: Challenges and Rewards of Working with Youth

The FIRST LEGO League (FLL) organizes friendly competitions between students, ages 9to 14-years-old. The competition focuses on engineering challenges addressing a theme in science and technology. For 2006, FLL chose nanotechnology as the central theme. The youth used a semi-autonomous robot constructed from LEGO ® brand building blocks to perform tasks related to current themes in nanotechnology research. In addition to the robot competition, the students researched and presented on a current topic in the field of nanotechnology. To facilitate the project, FLL relies on volunteers from the community including coaches and mentors. This paper explores the experience of two graduate engineering students from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) as they mentor the Kipps Elementary School FLL team. The two graduate students acted as technical mentors to the team. As mentors, the graduate students provided technical direction without suggesting actual design ideas to the team as the youth designed and built the robot for competition. The overall administration of the team was handled by the coach, a volunteer from the community, who managed the assignments, focus, and discipline of the group. To effectively mentor the youth, the graduate students each attended at least one meeting per week and worked closely with the coach to follow appropriate strategies in their mentoring. Since the coach had prior experience with FLL and this team, he was relied upon to make decisions regarding team focus and strategy. The youth worked on specific tasks in smaller subgroups, where the mentors were called upon to help focus the youths’ energy to the task given by the coach. The mentors found working with the FLL to be a fun and rewarding experience. One major reward had been observing the delight of the children when they produced an idea. Another reward was the sense of accomplishment felt by the mentor when one of the children showed understanding of a concept the mentor was describing. This paper also addresses the following challenges experienced by the mentors as they relate to FLL mentoring: communication with children and the language difficulties, the youths’ concentration level on a problem and their narrow or wide focus, the difficulty of leading to learning as opposed to giving answers, and the creation of a constructive versus a destructive atmosphere. Background on First LEGO League FIRST LEGO League (FLL) is a joint effort between FIRST, “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology,” and the LEGO Group created in 1998 for children under fourteen. 1 FLL combines the visions of FIRST and the LEGO Group. Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway Human Transporter, founded FIRST to excite children in the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). 2 The LEGO Group motivates children to “playfully [develop] a set of future, highly-relevant capabilities: Creative and structured problem-solving, curiosity and imagination, interpersonal skills and physical motor skills building with LEGO bricks is thus about ‘learning through play.’” 3 The theme of the 2006 competition was nanotechnology. Each mission on the mat incorporated an idea of nanotechnology, mostly areas of current research. Figure 1 illustrates the missions the youth were challenged to overcome. These missions include themes representing atom manipulation, stain resistant fabric, nanotube strength, smart medicine, and atomic force microscopy. These missions were given as a starting point for the research portion of the competition and to encourage the youth to learn more about nanotechnology. Additional emphasis about the nano scale is indicated on the mat. Figure 1: Illustration of the mat including all the missions for the 2006 nanotechnology theme. Graduate Students’ Reasons for Mentoring For a graduate level Engineering Education class, all the students were required to choose a LEGO League team to mentor. The graduate students chose the Kipps Elementary School FLL team due to conflicts in scheduling with the others teams. Kipps Elementary School FLL Team The Kipps Elementary School FLL team consists of eight children, equally composed of boys and girls. The coach is the father of one of the children and volunteered to work with the team. All of the youth are under the age of eleven, thus the team competed in the Division I category.