CS3: Architect, Client, and Delays

Greetings FIRST LEGO League Oregon,

In today's FIRST LEGO League Oregon Update we will cover these items:

1. Last Chance for Coach Parent & Mentor Workshops
   
2. Team Support Still Available
3. Important Dates!
4. Free Table
5. FIRST Tech Challenge Kickoff
6. What the Wait?
7. Team Meeting Guide Check-in
8. Mac User EV3 Warning!

Use this link to read this update as a blog post

  If you are new to this email or blog this is the place where you will find all of the OREGON specific FIRST LEGO League information, as well as helpful guides to get your team through the CITY SHAPER FIRST LEGO League season. Coaches and team administrators in the FIRST system for the CITY SHAPER season will be added every Monday until March, automatically. Every update this season begins with CS (CITY SHAPER) and a number, that number lets you know which update it is, if you miss an update you can find it on our blog. 

1) Last Chance for Coach Parent & Mentor Workshops

September marks the last chance for Coach, Parent, & Mentor Workshops. These are free workshops for anyone who wants to learn more about FIRST LEGO League and learn about how the EV3 robot system works. You can see our remaining workshops on this page, click the city name to sign up!

Upcoming Cities are:

Aloha (Beaverton/Hillsboro)
Baker City
Ontario (actually in Vale)
Pendleton
Hood River
Oregon City
Salem

If you have not yet made it to training, I hope you can attend one of the upcoming events!

2) Team Support Still Available

ORTOP still has funds for teams! Especially for rookie teams or a new team at a location where the existing teams have already registered. However, even if you are a returning team I am happy to help any team that qualifies with what support I have.  Please read the application page fully. Some teams are not eligible for the support we have available because they did not answer the questions is a way that allowed them to qualify.  Common mistakes are not discussing actual techniques and training for inclusion and equity with diversity, and not specifying a detailed timeline which includes the tournament dates. 

Please apply soon as awards are being handed out until the funds run out. If your team applies and doesn't form, it's easy to return the award as long as National Registration has not yet been paid, or to decline if an award letter is issued. 

*Remember if your team has received an EV3 robot kit from ORTOP in the last 2 seasons (HYDRO DYNAMICS or INTO ORBIT) you are required to register again this year!

3) Important Dates!

• Sept 23- Last day to submit a Team Financial Support Application (unless funds run out)
• Oct 9 - Last day to register a team in Oregon
• Oct 9-16 - Qualifying Tournament Registration Open
• Oct 31 - Last day to pay Qualifying Tournament Application Fee
• Nov 1 - Tournament Assignments Posted
• Dec 7, 8, 14, & 15 - Oregon Qualifying Tournaments
• Jan 18 & 19 - Intel Oregon FIRST LEGO League Championship Tournaments

4) Free Table

A FIRST LEGO League table (no legs) is available in the Garden Home area. If your team needs a table to practice on this season please contact Amy at amylynnparra@gmail.com

5)FIRST Tech Challenge Kickoff

FIRST Tech Challenge Kickoff is this Saturday. If your team is in 6th through 8th grade, now is a great time to go see what the next level of FIRST looks like. If your team may move up in the next two years, this is a great opportunity to network with your local coaches on a day when they aren't bustling around with their teams or to meet teams if only 1 or 2 team members are ready to move up. 

Kickoffs will take place in:
Beaverton
Bend
Canby
Hood River
Medford
Springfield
Tillamook

Many FIRST Tech Challenge teams like to mentor FIRST LEGO League teams. Just another thing you can talk about with them at their kickoff!

6) What the Wait?

Adventures in shipping have been impacting teams across the US. Some teams who registered in June or July are still waiting on their books and challenge sets while other teams who registered a week abo have shipping notices for the coming week! I can only picture the chaos at LEGO Education and FIRST as something out of a Goofy cartoon, like the one where he tries out all the sports. Whatever is happening, it's a good thing all of our teams know Gracious Professionalism and carry themselves with our Core Values in all of their interactions. If it has been a month, I do recommend contacting FIRST (for books) and LEGO Education for your Challenge Set - but wait until Friday, they are out of the office today. 

What to do now

While you are waiting, feel free to grab the CITY SHAPER Game Guide and all of the UPDATES, because those are coming nearly weekly, and start work on the Innovative Project part of the challenge. Everything you need to know about the Innovative Project requirements is in the Game Guide. Here is a little advice to make sure your team is on the right track with their problem.

Take the Game Guide as your starting point and turn each requirement into a question your team needs to answer clearly in less than 4 sentences. What problem have you identified with a building or public space in your community? Or to make it easier, break it down (here you want 1 sentence or fewer answers)

• What is the problem?
• What is the building or public space?
• Who is the community?

If this can be easily explained then make sure you include the simple explanation in your presentation for the judges. Over the season as the knowledge of the problem grows, this basic explanation can get lost and judges don't always make the connections the team hopes they will.

Another thing your team can do is work on team unity, understanding, and Core Values. There are a lot of Core Values activities available around the internet, but you can feel free to make your own as well.

7) Team Meeting Guide Check-in

How to use the Team Meeting Guide

The Team Meeting Guide is new for FIRST LEGO League this year. In the FIRST LEGO League Oregon Update we will use the Team Meeting Guide as a weekly check-in. This check-in will assume you are working through 1 session a week.  Most teams meet at least twice a week, so it is completely feasible to work ahead if you choose to use the Team Meeting Guide at all. That’s right, using the Team Meeting Guide and the Engineering Notebook, as provided by FIRST, are completely optional. It is strongly recommended that your team does keep some form of Engineering Notebook, but this is not something that will be collected at the tournament and is purely for your team to keep their ideas, tests, and thoughts as well as to learn engineering best practices. 

Two Groups:

One of the first things the Team Meeting guide and Engineering notebook suggests you do is divide your team in half, so you have two groups of 4-5 team members. This makes a lot of sense for doing activities as having the whole team on one task at a time can be a challenge. However, the advice does fall short of making a successful team. If your groups stay the same all season, as the guide suggests, you don’t have a team, you have two separate teams that don’t understand each other as fully as most single teams do. It is ORTOP’s suggestion that if you divide your team into groups, you switch up the groups every 2 Team Meeting Guide Sessions. Group 1 and 2 alternate between learning and working on the robot and the project challenges. It is critical that all team members participate fully in both of these activities. Every full rotation, or two sessions, is a great place to shuffle the groups so all team members get the opportunity to work together and get to understand each others’ strengths and weaknesses. 

Missed lessons:

Through most of the learning meetings, the groups never do each other’s activities. Additionally, if

the groups were to switch tasks during the same meeting you would need nearly 3 hours for both groups to accomplish everything. If it is part of your goals that each team does all of the EV3 and Project learning activities, ORTOP suggests having the groups do 1 activity at a first meeting of the week, for this example; we will say that is Tuesday. Then on Thursday, or the next meeting, have the groups switch. Make sure you leave time at the end of the second meeting for both groups to talk about what they learned over the week and share with one another as a team. Do not switch groups between those two meetings. 

Not all students may need the EV3 or project training, but it is very helpful to make sure those who do are the ones that take the lead (keyboard and mouse) for those activities. 

While the Project Challenge and Robot Game rules appear in the Team Meeting Guide and the Engineering Notebook, please make sure each team member has a copy of the CITY SHAPER Game Guide and each week has any new CITY SHAPER Challenge Updates. These are the official rules that all teams will be using this season. 

Next week, we will discuss the goals of The Architect lesson. Checking to make sure your team has met these goals by the end of the week will keep your team on schedule or ahead all season. 

8) Mac User EV3 Warning!

The current version of the EV3 Lab software is not compatible with the upcoming update to macOS, called Catalina. We are therefore introducing a brand-new EV3 app in November 2019, called LEGO® MINDSTORMS® Education EV3 Classroom. Based on the SPIKE™ app, EV3 Classroom will feature a coding language based on Scratch that we are confident will unleash the full potential of EV3 in the FIRST LEGO League program. The first release of EV3 Classroom will be in US English, followed by the other 15 EV3 languages in spring 2020.

To continue to enjoy an uninterrupted EV3 experience and to avoid losing your programs, we strongly recommend that you do not update to Catalina until the end of the FIRST LEGO League season in July 2020. If you have already updated to the new OS, please contact Technical Consumer Service at education.LEGO.com/en-us/support to discuss how we can help you during this transition period.

For further questions and support, we encourage you to reach out to Technical Consumer Service using the link above.

Best regards,
The Competitions Team

Welcome back to a new school year! We are about 1/3rd of the way to our goal number of teams, and there is plenty of time to register for this new season. My inbox is being bombarded with parents looking into this program for their kids. So please reach out to your communities and let them know you are there. It's easier to start a new team with support!

This weekend I will be both at the Beaverton FIRST Tech Challenge Kickoff at School of Science and Technology and at the OMSI Mini Maker Faire. If you are at either event please come at say hi, it's so nice to see your faces and not just your email addresses. As always I am here for each team all season, but I will be on the road next week as I am conducting the workshops in Baker City, Ontario, and Pendleton. I hope to meet even more of you there! I will have some email access, but not during the day. I also won't be in my office to answer the phone.

I hope your September is a good one, look for another update soon!

Best Wishes,
Loridee

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