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