How to Build a LEGO Robotics Team

By Shelly Browne

 

Take several homeschooled boys, aged 10–14, add a pile of LEGO bricks, a robot, and a challenge to solve, and you get a LEGO robotics team! Our organization, ARCHERS for the Lord, Inc. (The Association of Relaxed Christian Home Educators), decided to participate this past year. During our first year of participation in FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) LEGO robotics, we built the game set in the basement of one of our leaders and used her kitchen for filming a video about the research project.

The FIRST LEGO robotics program emphasizes teamwork, innovation, and courteous professionalism in their worldwide competitions. The program kicks off in August with the announcement of the theme for the year. Past themes have included bone cancer and alternative energy. This year’s team was “The Food Factor,” and all projects were to focus on food safety. Each team works together to build a robot that moves and lifts objects with handheld robot controllers. There is a series of competitions, although a team doesn’t have to be part of the actual competition process. In fact, there are even ways to participate with just your own family; however, we found that the learning process the boys experienced as part of a group was well worth the additional organizational work on the part of the parents.

One Wednesday afternoon, the boys met around a homemade plywood table, and each chose a piece of the setup to build: rat traps, cold storage trailers, cows, a giant sink to wash germs in, and towers holding bacteria and viruses for the LEGO robot to contain. Their challenge was to remove food-borne illness and contaminants from farm, trucking, and fishing industries and to get the food safely to the table within two and a half minutes, using the robot they would build.      (more…)

Does Homeschooling Leave You Stuck at Home?

Homeschooling can offer your kids a myriad of educational life experiences.

The Basics:[1]
Over 1.5 million kids
Or 3% of all kids
Are homeschooled.

84% received all education at home[1]
11% go to school <9 hours a week
5% go to school from 9-25 hours a week

But that doesn’t mean they’re trapped at home.
They’re busy doing some cool things.

Reasons for homeschooling:[1]
36% Religious or moral instruction
21% Concern about school environment (safety, drugs, negative peer pressure)
17% dissatisfaction with academic instruction
14% Other reasons (family time, finances, travel, distance)
7% Want to provide a non-traditional approach to education
6% health problems or special needs

In general homeschooled kids are smart:      (more…)

Paul Revere’s Ride in Context

By Adam Andrews

 

When our kids were little, Missy and I used to read them Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem about Paul Revere. It’s a great poem—a classic by any definition. We particularly like how the poem’s imagery takes us back in time, and we imagine ourselves in the Boston hinterland on the 18th of April, 1775, as Paul Revere rides out to warn his countrymen of the British threat. Even the rhythm of the piece recalls a galloping horse:

LISTen my CHILDren and YOU shall HEAR
Of the MIDnight RIDE of PAUL reVERE.

In all the years that I read it to my children, I had never thought to ask them what Longfellow’s poem was about. It went without saying, I suppose. It’s about the American Revolution, of course. It’s about the famed Minutemen of Massachusetts and their heroic battle with the British at Old North Bridge in Concord.

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year . . .
In the books you have read
How the British regulars fired and fled
How the farmers gave them ball for ball
From behind each fence and farmyard wall . . .

But in larger sense, the poem is also about the American spirit. It’s about how Americans won’t stand for slavery and how they fight against any and all threats to their liberties. Longfellow urges his readers to adopt the Minutemen’s attitude toward oppression and tyranny:      (more…)