Anyone else doing First Robotics Leagues?

[katroshka]

My daughter participated in First Lego League this year, it was the first year anyone involved had done it, it was really disorganized and we are going to have to make a lot of changes for next year. I plan on getting a lot more involved as my daughter was so enthusiastic and my younger daughter will also be participating. I would love input from other parents who have participated in any of the programs, or if you have any applicable advice from other activities. Here are some of my questions/ concerns from this year:

-Meetings: how many per week? We started off with one hour per week but quickly realized it wasn't enough.

-Forming teams: we had a lot of interest from parents at the school, so ended up forming two teams of 10 kids. Unfortunately, it became apparent pretty quickly that many of the kids, especially the kids on my daughter's team, had little interest in actually working. I don't know if some of the kids thought it was just a club to play with legos or what... but many of the kids flat out refused to work, especially on the research project/ presentation. Also, when the first competition was drawing closer and we started having one or two extra meetings a week, my daughter was the only kid from her team that would show up. The other team had a few more, but the commitment level was not great. I have a suspicion that if we start out asking for two or three meetings per week that many of the less committed kids/ parents will not want to get involved, but don't really know. There has been some talk of doing interviews of the kids, but I don't know exactly what we should look for from these interviews.

-Assigning tasks: Should we rotate the tasks between the kids so they all get to work on the different parts, i.e. programming, robot building/ design, presentation research/ writing. This year my daughter really took to the programming and ended up doing all of it, but I'm not sure this was the best way to do things.

-Parent/ coach involvement: I'm not sure how to balance things between adults managing and kids working independently. All the kids this year were 4th and 5th graders, so pretty young. Not sure what next year will be like.

-Corporate sponsorship: I noticed at the competitions that many of the other teams (especially the better ones) had corporate logos from local tech/ defense companies on their t-shirts. Are these companies donating money, volunteer time, both? Should we be looking into this, and if so, how?

-Gender issues: out of the 20 kids on both teams, there were only 3 girls, my daughter was the only girl on her team. She initially was getting a little slack from the boys, though that stopped fairly quickly as it became clear she was the most skilled and dedicated kid on the team, but still. I felt like the team would have been stronger had there been a better gender balance. I noticed at competitions that the teams made up of older kids had way more girls on them than the younger teams. Are there any good strategies to recruit more girls?

I hope I can find some other parents with experience on here, if anyone has any suggestions for other forums to post this on please let me know. Thanks!

[Emmeline II]

My ds school is K-12 with 600ish students. His school had try-outs per grade where the student were timed building their own...not sure what exactly, I wasn't in the room. Only 2-3 students per grade made the team, which I think competed at elementary, Jr. and Sr. High levels.

Ds didn't make the team, so I don't have many details, but I don't think parents were involved in managing the team; just teachers. They met two days a week for at least an hour, maybe hour and a half. Ds' school is a science and technology charter school but there were barely any girls trying out at the lower grades; though the school doesn't really step up the science and tech until 3rd grade. Perhaps if you had demonstrations, perhaps separating genders for that, it would help. Ds' school has a lot of competition, but using many small groups.