TAMU Engineering Dept. is hosting an informational meeting for kids and parents interested in forming FIRST Lego League (4th-8th grade) and Jr. FIRST Lego League (1st-3rd grade) teams for the upcoming season on Tuesday, August 11 from 5:30-6:30 at the Sbisa classroom on campus. Parking is available in the North Side Garage. TAMU is interested in helping teams with coaches and possibly with finding funding. Currently there is only one FLL team in B/CS and most of the kids are aging out of the program next year. We're hoping to get enough kids interested to field 10 teams for this next season so that TAMU can host a qualifier tournament here in town.

For more information about FIRST Lego League, see www.usfirst.org/fll or http://centraltxfirst.org/fll-program or email me at jrhmcastillo at gmail dot com. Please RSVP with me if you plan to come but feel free to come anyway even if you forget to RSVP. I've coached a team for the last 4 years and it's been one of the best learning experiences for my kids. Teams can participate through Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, 4-H, schools, neighborhoods, or any other groups. I would love to see as many kids as possible take advantage of this amazing learning opportunity!

WHen are meetings and is there a cost? My son would love this, but we are already in soccer two nights a week so I don't want conflicts.

It depends on the team and the coach. We're just getting teams formed so meeting dates and times have not been set. The cost will depend on the make up of the team and what kind of grants and sponsors the team can get. It's kind of like starting up a new sports league. I will say that our time commitment last season was one 2 hour meeting a week for Sept.-Oct. and then more as we got closer to the tournament in early Dec. I have a seasoned team, though, so it might take a little more time at the front end of the season to get a team up to speed. If you make it past the qualifier to an invitational tournament, you continue working until that tournament usually in early March. I'm hoping we might get some of the local elementary and middle schools interested in offering us room to do this as an afterschool program.

FUNgineering is in the process of getting up to four teams together, including one Junior FLL team, and hopefully one girls only team.

AWESOME! You have no idea how excited I am that others are working on getting kids to participate in this. Coaching this for four years has been incredibly rewarding and I hated telling kids our team was full. Thanks for working on this!!

My child is entering kindergarten this year, but will keep this in mind for next year. Please post here again as a reminder.

I wish the local high schools competed in FIRST instead of BEST. Much more entertaining game to watch, just significantly higher cost.

I agree. I've had kids on my team who also competed in BEST but they like the FIRST format better. BEST is still fun but just not quite as fun as FIRST. FIRST is pretty expensive but there are a ton of grants out there.

Lots of teams compete in both. BEST is a fall competition FIRST is in the spring (along with BotBall and MATE which I prefer to FIRST) BEST is at no cost to schools a typical FIRST team the team has to fund raise $14000. This same $14000 supplies kits for 20 BEST teams, and funds the complete competition at the hub level. There are many schools that cry to BEST to form teams in their area but since BEST is completely run by volunteers and donors they can only do so much. My big issue with FIRST is its a competition of haves and have nots. You can get a grant to form a team but typically you are not even competitive without access to industry mentors and lots of pricey industrial equipment. We see this time and time again where the team that has access to large CNC mills, laser cutters and the like are in a different class. I know many professional engineers who really love FIRST season. They get to play with all the cool tools making parts for their team. I have no problem with participants using cool tools, but that is not how it happens in my experience. At least with BEST teams formed in the AG shop in towns like Caldwell, Mumford, and home school teams anywhere can beat teams from A list private school in Dallas sponsored by the likes of Raytheon since they started with the same box of "junk" and the only difference is working through the engineers process to refine the design the solve the problem.

Also if you are looking for a inexpensive to field early years robotic competition you might want to look at GEAR robotics. Along the lines of BEST in that teams are no cost and LEGO based.

The FIRST teams that FUNgineering is putting together are the Junior FLL (age 6-9) and FLL (age 9-14) teams. From what we understand, this will primarily be a Fall activity, with qualifiers in Decmeber. It only goes into Spring if you get invited to Nationals.

Also, the 6-14 age group FIRST competitions are all Lego based, and FUNgineering is covering all of the hardware cost.

I'm not sure where that $14000 figure comes from, unless you are talking about the high school level teams. We are only doing elementary, intermediate, and middle school.

He's talking the FIRST Robotics Competition. BEST doesn't have the younger competitions like FLL and Jr. FLL. GEARs is fun but not nearly as challenging as FLL. My team finished all the GEARs challenges in two or three meetings last year. 4-H does a modified GEARs competition and adds a project component but the only competitions are up in Lubbock. We used the GEARs competition format for the robotics camp I did at the Lincoln Center for 4-H this summer.

We actually started a FIRST team in Smithville prior to moving and yeah it was expensive. Fun but expensive. And since that was a rural area we had some generous grants through Texas Workforce Commission which helped a ton.

Either way good to see kids getting exposed to engineering & computer programming.

And the lower cost option for older kids is FIRST Tech which is what my team wants to do next if we can find a coach. My English (rhetoric) and journalism degree from TAMU just doesn't cut it for the skills to coach that level even though IBM was willing to call me a software engineer because of my writing and coding skills.

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Either way good to see kids getting exposed to engineering & computer programming.

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BEST is Middle & High School
GEAR was started by a group of BEST hubs and its director is from Garland ISD. While they do hold competations in Lubbock but there are others around the state including San Antonio which is much closer.
The big deal in robotics currently is what will the state do. Right now TX UIL is supposed to add robotics as sanctioned activity in 2015/16
Your English degree software enginnering should make you a BEST proponent. For those not famaliar with BEST its really to competitions, the Robot Competition and the BEST award. The Robot competition is similar to FIRST except its not as cool since it costs 1/20 the amount. The BEST award is the higher of the two awards and includes producing Design documentation, Investors Presentation, Web Site, Marketing materials and a Trade Show booth promoting your design along with your robots performance. The founders of BEST were serious about including fun while teaching people about all the aspects of engineering not having fun with an education side effect. They both are retired from TI now and their designs are included in things from the earliest personal computers to the electronics that is the foundation of the LIghting connector on every Iphone/pad built today. They truly believe engineering needs to be part of and supported by many diciplines.

FIRST is a great program. And you get lots of cool stuff, likely worth double the $14,000 it cost to field a team. The question is if the cool is worth leaving thousands of kids who can't rasise the funds or solicit the grants out of the game.

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And the lower cost option for older kids is FIRST Tech which is what my team wants to do next if we can find a coach. My English (rhetoric) and journalism degree from TAMU just doesn't cut it for the skills to coach that level even though IBM was willing to call me a software engineer because of my writing and coding skills.

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You mentioned that your team is aging out next year. Shoot me an email at Jeremy at FUNgineeringCS dot com. Depending on how this year goes (our first with FLL), we might be able to provide some help next year.

I've set up a Facebook event with the information on where the meeting room is on campus. Please feel free to join the event. I'm also keeping a list of people who have emailed me that they are coming. Thanks!

http://www.facebook.com/events/927823600593014/

The College of Engineering has also put up a page for this event.

http://engineering.tamu.edu/easa/areas/outreach/first-lego-league

This meeting is tonight. We've had great response so far. Hope to see many of you there! Please RSVP on the TAMU Engineering page even if you can't make it to the meeting and we'll send you the information after the meeting.

http://engineering.tamu.edu/easa/areas/outreach/first-lego-league

So who went to the meeting?

I heard from the organizers that they had over 200 people in attendance.

I wish I could have been there, but I made sure to tell all of our families.

Things are looking good on our end. It looks like we may have as many as six teams.