Hangin' with the GISE...

Atticus is in a two-day-a-week after school Lego Robotics group called GISE (for the boys) and GEMS (for the girls). A week or so ago (time is all blurry for me), they had their first competition/demonstration. There were volunteers from the middle school and high school programs. The boys were broken into teams of four who built their bot and then learned how to program them to reach certain set objectives. For this first competition, the Lego tables were set up with 12 different obstacles. Each team's bot was to accomplish between 1 and 3 tasks on the table. Atticus' team was succesful with their two tasks. Then they had a logic challenge -- given a stack of index cards and a length of tape to build the tallest structure they could manage. That didn't go so well, but they boys had good teamwork and communicated well with each other during the task and were very good-humored about their fail. Then they demonstrated their bot for a teacher evaluator who asked questions to find out how much they understood about what they had done so far. The boys did great on that part. At the end of the 2 hours, the girls' team from the middle school demonstrated their bot's skills and told about their experience placing 2nd in the statewide middle-school competition. I had the three younger kids with me and our neighbor boy friend too. But thankfully, the competition was in the school library and all the kids are readers so it went well.  Good job, Atticus and Company!