So, I was forced to write a letter home to one of my robotics kids' parents yesterday:

I was inspired, I suppose, by that Taylor Mali video. Not that I'm that awesome yet. Someday. I recently read a quote that I hope sticks with me for a while: "It's harder to be nice than clever." But then again, this letter wasn't even remarkably nice; it was just the honest thing to do.

And then I gave the student a bag of Hot Cheetos and some bite-sized candies. At which point, he informed me that I was "all right". Which might have been the best thing I've heard in a while:

"Ross, you all right."

I couldn't help but smile the entire bus ride back to Harvard.

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Planning this week's lesson (#6) was tough. Last week was a disaster. Having split up students by the missions they were aiming to accomplish, we divided the groups between Diane (to do some programming) and myself (for building).

Those that didn't just walk away from my building table (I let them, not having the heart to tell them not to program) stuck around only to distract each other by building model cars, motorcycles, or other (neat, but off-task) things. On the bright side, I suppose, Diane said that programming made some progress. Still, not good for a full 10% of our time with these kids.

So, we met with Danielle (our new TA) and decided that we were going to go back to the old, broken model of Programming Team, Building Team, and Project Team. So much for changing things up from the old Chocobots team. We put off making the actual divisions until my and Diane's weekly planning meeting on Sunday night.

Of course, the planning meeting hasn't happened on Sunday night for the last few weeks; it's been ad-hoc postponed until Monday at least twice before -- today, we did one better and spent so much time psetting in the Eliot dining hall that we gave up and set the meeting for lunch the day of.

So the two of us are sitting in the Queens' Head Pub beneath Memorial Hall, --

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Learning Education

Earlier this fall, I lotteried for  USW35, "Dilemmas of Equity and Excellence in American K-12 Education". But, like 70% of those who tried to get a seat, I was rejected. So, instead, I'm taking a math course in Functional Analysis (Math 114). It satisfies my Analysis requirement for my joint CS/Math concentration. So there's that.

There's also the fact that professor Lurie has taught me more about how to teach at OGPS than I imagine "Equity and Excellence" ever could. (Aside: In no way do I mean this as a slight against Prof. Merseth. I'm sure that her class is fantastic. But the impression I got from shopping week was that it's a very academic treatment of the education problem in our country, and not "Here's how to teach a kid to program a computer for the first time.")

Now, Jacob Lurie is a frighteningly intelligent man. His undergraduate thesis, for example, contains some words that I know.

My critical reading of "On Simply Laced Lie Algebras and their Miniscule Representations" by J. Lurie, 2000

It also won a first place in the American Mathematical Society's Morgan Prize "for superior mathematical research by an undergraduate student". And he earned a full professorship from Harvard at age 31. So there's that.

He's got a fascinating lecture style. At the beginning of class, he picks a point on the ceiling, and proceeds to deliver the entire hour-long lecture at it. (Quoth Nick Watters: "You

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I had a surreal moment today. At about 8pm, and OGPS janitor walked in to find me still in the classroom, and asked "Aren’t you too old to be playing with Legos?"

You see, I was busy finishing the FLL game board models (that is, obstacles and scoring objects for the FLL Robot Game) and was completely engrossed in constructing a six-inch-long truck. Now, there are a few answers I could have given:

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No, I’m not too old. No one’s too old.

I was, after all, completely relaxed for the first time in several days. Though I’ve not had a serious Lego project for years, I had managed to slip back into the flow of pieces fitting together the way they should, and the way I knew they were going to.

Incidentally, I’d encountered the same nostalgia earlier in the day, when I was preparing a few demo robot routines for our "Intro to Programming" lesson. I had had my father ship to me the bulk of my family’s FLL collection, and had unpacked the Chocobots '08 competition bot (still in pristine condition) to use for the demo. Now there was a beautiful design. Our team really knew how to build by the end there, and our final season’s robot was compact, robust, versatile, and capable of attempting every mission on the board that year, if I recall correctly. We weren’t winning, but we were being clever, and doing it in style.

I may be too old by far to be an FLL competitor, but I haven’t fallen out of love with problem-solving with my

The other advantage we have over the Chocobots (Columbia-Howard County Robotics) circa 2006 is we've got a coach who understands the FLL competition very well. We, the coaches, can do intelligent things like leverage the mission-driven nature of the FLL game to organize our classroom activities sensibly, nudge our team members down paths that we (I) expect to pay off, based on past experiences ("How about tackling a shorter mission first, for easy points?"). In short, we intend give our kids the best experience we can by being prepared.

This, on review, is extremely unfair to the former Chocobots coaches. They (that is, my father, and the father of another of the team's founding members) gave new meaning to the word prepared. For a pair that knew nothing of FLL before the team's founding, they did their research fast, and wrote lesson plans, tracked popular strategies published online, built demo models and prototypes (which were promptly disassembled after team critique and discussion), planned and executed field trips, brought in special speakers, built game boards, designed logos, and tracked down software, kits, and parts.

The one thing they didn't do for us was the work. FLL, of course, is about kids' efforts, not coaches' contributions. And

Today, I was late getting out of OS class, so I missed the 2:53 1 bus to Roxbury. And so I had to bike for about half an hour (I passed two 1 busses on my way, though -- never change, Boston) to get to Orchard Gardens Pilot School (hereafter 'OGPS' or 'OG').

I -- and the incredibly multitalented Diane Yang -- are volunteering with the nonprofit Citizen Schools to run an afterschool Lego Robotics team for the OGPS 6th grade. We'll be helping them to plan, design, build, and program a Lego Mindstorms robot to compete in the FIRST Lego League Challenge (FIRST, here is a forced backronym, not an adjective).

It should be an enormous amount of fun. I'm also incredibly scared.

You see, when I competed in FLL (three seasons, 2006-2008), I was coming from five weeks of summer camp where I had learned -- in some exhaustive detail -- the ins and outs of the Mindstorms RCX platform. (NXT is a definite upgrade hardware-wise, but the software level is basically the same.) The team of friends that I assembled included many, many good-at-math types who had been working with computers, Legos, and their intersection from young ages. And since meetings were at my house, my brother and I effectively lived with the robot, game