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Ian got a lego mindstorms robotics set about a year or so ago and has been having fun playing with it. My sister Pamela and my niece and nephew got involved in the First Lego League up in Anchorage. This fall Ian wanted to get involved, since he's a little young for the FLL, I set up a Junior First Lego League team that Rhonda Hill and I are coaching.

in First Lego League (FLL) you form teams of up to ten kids ages 9 to 14 and one or more coaches. There is a new "challenge" issued every year. This years challenge is nanotech. Basically all teams have to build a robot to complete as many of the 9 missions in the allotted time. The challenge takes place on a 4' by 8' table. The kids build a robot and any extensions out of a Lego Mindstorms kit (you can also use the older (as of this year) mindstorms 2.0 instead of mindstorms nxt kits). They are limited to the number of bricks (the robot brain), motors and sensors they can use. They are allowed to make different extensions to plug into their robot between challenges, but they aren't allowed to reprogram the robot on the fly, so they have to deal with the "limited" memory on the brick. Its not really that limited, the NXT brick has 256K of memory 248K more than my first computer :)

The basic idea is that its up to the kids to figure out how to do everything, the coaches are just there to assist by asking questions when they get stuck.

Thats the FLL, the Junior First Lego League (JFLL) is for teams of 1 to 6 kids ages 6 to 9 and one or more coaches. The JFLL challenge is also nanotech. But in this case the kids have to create a lego model that shows in three different scales what they've decided to study, and tie it back to nanotechnology. They also have to create a poster describing their area of study (our kids picked cheetahs) and how it relates to nanotechnology.

Right now four kids (all in 2nd grade) and Rhonda and I are meeting once a week at the Granby Library (great new building!) trying to get ready for the Colorado state competition/meet in Boulder on December 9.

Anyhoo, I'll keep you posted (hopefully :) ) as to the kids progress.