A Hearty Congratulations, Coaches!

You made it through the qualifiers. Please give yourselves a big pat on the back. Helping a team prepare for and then attend a qualifying tournament is no small feat and I hope you take a moment to acknowledge what you’ve done.

If your team qualified for one of the semifinal tournaments, congratulations! If your team didn’t, congratulations! Either way, your team built a robot, programmed it to autonomously complete tasks, researched a real-world problem, met with experts, came up with a solution, gave a presentation, worked together, and (hopefully) had a lot of fun along the way. Whether your team is just beginning or is well-experienced, if you made it to a qualifier tournament, I promise that the kids on your team learned valuable skills and lessons that they will take with them into the future.

I have received several questions from coaches about how their teams can improve and my advice is always the same: read the rubrics. Every judge that I’ve observed in action would be delighted to award every team they evaluate 3’s (or better) in every category, but the team has to give the judge the opportunity to do so. For instance, a judge can only give a team 3’s under the Identify section of the Innovation Project rubric if the team has a “clear definition” of the problem it is solving and the team has “clear, detailed research from a variety of sources.” Not only must your team have done this, but it must also effectively communicate to the judge that it did it.

However, in the end it’s important not to base your team’s success on awards or how other teams did. After all, no other team came into the season with the exact same skill set and challenges as your team. Instead, compare your team against where it was at the beginning of the season, or last season, or the season before. If you see growth in that comparison, then you’ve had a successful season in my book. Remember, FIRST LEGO League is about playing the long game. The foundation you build now with the kids will serve them well in the future.

Thank you for the time, energy, and dedication you put into coaching. High 5’s to all of you!

Thank you for coaching!

Heather

Resources:

FLL Challenge: Share and Learn FB page
FIRST Inspires Resource Library
Cryptic Cookies Bits ‘n Bots Website
Judging session flowchart
Rubrics

This article is by the coach of an award-winning team called Cryptic Cookies Bits & Bots.