Robotics Tournament

   A very cool addition to Jonathan's education this school year has been his involvement in a VEX Robotics club. The is club made up of 4 boys (sometimes there are more kids and sometimes girls but the clubs tend to be heavily boys) who have been getting together since September to make a Robot using a kit that they were given at the beginning of the year.

  The kit that they use has a variety of parts (some rather like erector set pieces, also motors, gears, nuts, bolts, clear plastic sheets, wheels and more) but there are no instructions. The clubs are simply told what skills their robot needs to have in order to complete in the competition and then each club designs their own robot.

   This is a really cool way for kids to learn more about science, engineering, etc. Jonathan has learned a lot and absolutely loves it!

   A little over a week ago we all went to a town an hour and a half from here so that his team could have their robot compete with other teams from Northern MN. It was a long but really fun day. It was neat how they had teams form alliances with other teams so not only did they learn about Robot building but also had to work on skills such as communication and networking.

  We had thought that this might be the end of robotics for the year but the club decided they wanted to go to another competition in January (They ended up in about the middle of the field this time and did a great job) so they will keep working to make their robot even better until then.

    We are so blessed to be able to fun opportunities like this to help with learning.

   Have any of you ever had any involvement in robotics. It was totally new for us this year (some friends told us about it and we thought that it sounded perfect for Jonathan) but we are catching on a little to how it all works. Ken and I are happy that we aren't the ones that are having to design robots though as we have no clue how to do it.