I’ve been working with the Chicago Knights’, a nonprofit FIRST robotics team that serves the Chicagoland area & is non-specific to a school. They allow for homeschooled students & students without a schoool-led team to participate in FIRST robotics competitions!
I joined to be a programming mentor for Chicago Knights initially in 2019 - and found that I was able to help more when I was informed that a sister team was being created for the First Lego league. I volunteered to be the lead coach for the Lego League team and facilitated learning & build sessions for kids aged from 8 ~ 14 in building a robot to compete in the competition through out fall and winter of 2019.
The kids loved building the robot with legos and programming the robot in python! It was amazing and a humbling experience watching them grow, learning the syntax and problem solving to accomplish things by programming. I actually learned from the kids about Programming while teaching them because they brought a fresh view to how they approach problems. Near the end of 2019, we attended the region competition and although we didn’t score the most points - we were the rookie team that won the Rising Star award! With what we learned in 2019, I hope we can continue to build on it and do even better in 2020!
