A consistent topic of conversation amongst FIRST Lego League (FLL) coaches and mentors is how much help should the adults be giving students. It is a fine line, on one hand there is the desire for the students to succeed in the competition and on the other the need for the students to learn for themselves and experience success or failure by their own efforts.
In a similar school competition some years ago I watched as teachers followed the rule of the competition to the letter and did absolutely nothing for the students. The students had a great time but walked away disappointed about how 'bad' they were compared to other schools. In that competition I don't know if the top teams received help from their teachers, if they were more experienced with the competition and knew what to do or simply worked harder and were more motivated. But the final result was that the following year students didn't want to participate because of previous perceived failures.
Each year in FLL we see new schools enter the competition only to disappear the next year. Without being privy to their inner team conversations I can only speculate why they didn't return. Although it usually comes down to either cost to enter, time to prepare or failure to compete at the level they think they should be at.
So back to the issue of teacher help. By the strictest rules of FLL the coaches and mentors shouldn't do any of the work for the team. But what constitutes work, if the coach provides a robot design that the team build it who did the work? Or if the coach tells the team the sequence of code to use and the team actually write it?
In both cases I believe even the coach providing the code or the design is not in the spirit of the competition. The coach needs to be there providing support for the team but giving them something to copy doesn't help the team to learn. Real learning can be achieved by directing the team to resources, or demonstrating skills that the team then need to understand and apply to the FLL challenge.
I've talked previously about building demonstration machines from Yoshihito Isogawa's books. In collaboration with this I might demonstrate some different techniques for attaching to the robot but my goal is not to put all of those things together, those final steps of connecting concepts need to be done by the team.
The same goes with coding, before the competition actually kicks off the lessons in class are normally related to skills they might need in the tournament. Finding and following a line, aligning the robot around the mat or using sensors. When the competition starts I remind the team of those lessons and ask them to think about what they learnt or go back and load that code looking for hints.
When it comes to the competition it's important for the team to be honest about what they did and didn't do. Where a coach has helped the team they should be able to explain what the code or mechanism actually does and why.
Invariably there are teams at the tournament that were helped extensively by the coach. While we don't hear about it rest assured that the judges can spot this and will mark the team accordingly (or even disqualify them). As a coach I cannot imagine anything worse than knowing your team was disqualified because you didn't let the team do the work. Equally there is no pride for the team in collecting an award that they know the didn't do the work for.
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