Awesome Onions Win First Place in Robotic Design!

Today at the North Pacific Regional Robotics Challenge in College Place, Washington, four rookie First Lego League players took first place in Robotic Design, 2nd place in Project Presentation, 2nd place in Robotic Missions, and 3rd place in Team Competition. Some of us coaches were crying for joy, some were jumping up and down, and all were feeling that the many hours that had gone into this day's victories were hours well spent in training young people to become problem solvers. Pictured below are the six coaches and original five members of the Awesome Onions Robotics Team. On the back from the left to the right are Head Coach Sydney, Awesome Onion Yairin, Coach Annelise, Coach Shannon, Coach Tammy, and Coach German. In the front from left to right are Awesome Onion Jesús M. (who later went to Mexico and did not compete today), Awesome Onion Jesús I., Coach Mariela, Awesome Onion Miguel, and Awesome Onion Eliazar.

Teacher Tammy Takes on LEGO Robotics

This quarter a fantastic project landed in my lap, so to speak. I was teaching Technology Tools for Teachers, when I heard from a friend in the engineering department that a local LEGO Robotics club needed some coaches to help out the head coach, Sydney Foster, who had been leading the Awesome Onions LEGO Robotic Club for several years. "Yay!" I thought. "This is just what my students, all pre-service teachers, need in order to see what teaching Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) classes could look like at the middle-school level." The whole class agreed, so we wrote a set of lesson plans that would involve a short worship/focus time, a project segment, a team-building exercise, and a period of time studying what the LEGO robot could do.