A few things to be conscious of when mentoring a team
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Maturity
Not all middle school students will have a highly developed sense of maturity
Can be a problem in interpersonal situations
Can be remedied by focusing on a common goal
Alternatively, separate people into separate groups (robot, innovation project, etc)
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Demotivated students
In some team structures, students might be forced to join because of parents or other pressure
Keep in mind your goal is inspiring them
It may be possible to grow the student’s enthusiasm and help them be involved more
If they’re unmotivated by the team, everyone likes playing with legos
Demotivated students can rub off on friends
You want to avoid a bunch of students playing games in the corner
Make it very clear that the club/team is only for lego robotics
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Working together
Avoid too many cooks in the kitchen
Divide students into groups
4 students working on the same piece of code will result in frustration
Make sure to delegate roles to the students based on their skills
You can pair a student with pre existing knowledge with one who lacks it
Or assign bored students to help with testing so they stay involved
Make sure everyone has something to do
Bored middle schoolers are very destructive.
Avoid this.
It’s important everyone has a good experience
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Working together (more efficiently)
Two robots (depends on team size)
Enables multiple groups to iterate and learn at the same time
Make sure that the robots are 1:1 identical
Syncing code
This one is annoying
To a student, losing their code is devastating
Make sure they name everything consistently (difficult) and work within the same folder (very difficult)
The way we did it (which likely could use improvement) is have the students manually copy every piece of code into a main program in the end, kind of cursed
Consider(?) using a flash drive, never tested this before
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Other Mentors
I’ve found it useful to split responsibilities with other mentors/coaches
For example, a coach could delegate volunteers to manage groups working on specific tasks
Groups of students could be organized into tasks within the FLL challenge, the innovation project, etc
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The Innovation Project
Students are not inclined to finishing open ended projects in a time efficient manner
Encourage them to think of ideas early
Encourage them to research more into good ideas (wikipedia, youtube, etc)
You need to be there to help them decide on a finalized idea and project
Do not decide for them, only help them settle on final ideas