I wouldn’t have written about  starting  a  robotics team  here in this publicationhad it  not been for the true stories of the side benefits experienced by many parents like me and  young children in the community.  The season registration has just started and I hope some of you will find it useful.

FLL and Jr FLL are  flagship  programs and competitions  conducted by  firstinspires.org  .Jr  FLL is for grades  KG  to 4 and FLL is for grades 4 to 8. Primarily these are STEM oriented Robotics competition programs.     It is too much to write all the details here.You can find the details for FLL  here ( http://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/fll)

This author has  been  a coach and a mentor of an award winning   team of 9 kids.  What is so special about these programs are  notjust  thetechnology  part, it is the way the founder  Dean Kamen , envisioned to inculcate lot of other core values in younger kids to prepare them for real world challenges.  One of that is “Coopertition®” . This is a combination of Competition and Cooperation.  In today’s fierce competitive world,unfortunately, kidsstart to learn to compete at an early age.  I’m not writing about the stress or other negative aspects of that necessary evil in young minds as well as adults.  While coaching for these programs over the years I have seen how all the   participants develop the ability to work in teams and learn to fiercely compete while cooperating with whom they are competing. Those who are naturally shy come out more and those who are aggressive learn to tone down. Effectively, everyone learns mature leadership skills. This is so important as in today’s world, where unfortunatelyleadership is mistaken as quality of being verbose, high decibel and ruling others. 

The second motto of FLL is “Gracious Professionalism®”. Professionals are expected to behave  professionally at work place and in society.  Problem with some  young achievers in some competitive disciplines are  that they become overly professional devoid of human touch and doesn’t have the skills to work with real humans around them. FLL program tries to train the kids to grow up as  professionalswhile showing gracious qualities at young age. These belongs to the “Core Value” category of FLL competition. Our team won awards twice in this category.

Forget about all these high talks. A lot of parents have told me that their kids were forced to move away from TV, video games and non stop social media because of FLL team effect and now they  are motivated to spend time and  develop  advanced robotics stuff instead of  passive ctivities.That one single reason was enough for many parents to consider FLL. For some other parents it was the right step to move their kids who were already  Legoenthusiasts  to the higher level of Lego Mindtroms based on EV3 robotics .  This belongs  to the “Robotics Missions” competition part of the FLL. USFIRST conducts thesecompetitions  like any sports event with lot of fun and music and fanfare.  Instead of a nerve wrecking geek event it has the ambience of an exhilarating sports event. Most importantly all kids have fun throughout the season and during the events.

“Research Project” is the third category for competition in FLL. This gives kids an opportunityto come out with any innovative projects based on that year’s theme.  This encourages kids to think outside the box and help them to look at real world problems and ways to solve them. Last year our team won an award for IoT( Internet of Things) based Smart trash can.  Year before that,  our team of kids published a book and it  is available on Amazon. Thisbook  was about an easy way to teach programming concepts to small kids.

This is an interesting program but  at the same time a little bit overwhelming  for the new teams at the beginning to get started. Coach’s handbook itself has  100 pages. Mission instructions keeps changing throughout the season. A season may go up to 8 to 10 months culminating in local , national and international level meets. A lot of coordination and cooperation  among parents and coach is needed.  Team should have  a place to meet  and needs to  construct a special mission table measuring 4 feet by 8 feet. Will have to buy couple of Mindstorms  EV3 kits from Lego Education.  Will have to register and pay to get the “mission mat” from the USFIRSTweb  site.   Above all, firm commitment of parents and kids to their team for the entire season  is the most important  criteria.

The author coaches and mentors the award winning  “Team Unlimited Thinkers” in New Hyde park, NY. Author’s two daughters ( grade 6 and 7 ) are also in this team. The purpose of this article is to introduce this program to the  community and to offer any kind of initial information  to those planning to start a team in their locality. The whole FLL and USFIRST programs runs on not for profit volunteer basis.  Author is more than happy to share the experience with any  one planning to  start a team in their locality.  I ask all kids in my   team the question as to why  arethey motivated to be in the team. They all have different answers ranging from  pure fun to high technology dreams.  12 year old Sam asked me why am I motivated to do this. My answer to Sam was 1) Passion to learn new things and 2) If I were to undergo a surgery 20 years from now, I  prefer it from some one like Sam MD who has the right motivation ,  team skills and right professionalism and more importantly genuinely interested in STEM subjects from childhood than from some super brilliant  guy becoming a doctor who has no team skills or gracious professionalism skills.Like minded parents or prospective coaches thinking of starting a team may please feel free to  email. Vinodp99@yahoo.com  .  Team registration for 2016 started on May 10th. ( http://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/fll )