A few weeks ago Will and his buddy participated in a Lego competition at OMSI. Lego, aside from being responsible for making expensive cool toys, also sponsors some cool events to get kids interested in engineering. I knew about the program because our super cool engineering teacher at school runs a robotics club and even the big ids participate. So I signed Will up last year and the topic was Biomedical science. The goal was to build something in the science realm out of Legos and then present it to a panel of judges. The key is to have the kids do all of the work (note to self: 85% of the other pieces were done by parents. true story). The boys decided on a machine that allowed a doctor is numb and flavor a cotton swab before they shoved it down your throat for a strep test. good idea. strep tests SUCK! So Rob and I and Will's buddy's parents agreed the boys would do ALL of the work (that's what the directions said and I like to follow directions). So this is what they came up with:
Simple right? I thought it was perfect. But then when we dropped it off at OMSI on the morning of the competition we were met with super duper creations built by parents with their kids names on them. Why does that happen? What 6 year old thinks about creating a mobile medical unit that can aid people in the desert? i don't know. The project had to have a moving part so that little arm piece goes back and forth in between the flavors (the other boxes).
They also had to make a poster explaining their piece:
I had to blur out friends' face because he can't have random pictures of himself in cyber land...his parents say so!
Then my favorite part, they had to tlka about it to a complete stranger and answer questions too. it looked like this:
See all those parents? There must have been 4 parents for every child. Wow! and so many cameras.
At the end of the event, all of the kids got an award (Will's group got best invention for making medicine taste better) and then they got to play at OMSI for the afternoon. pretty fun stuff.
Addi went too and her day looked a lot like this (very happy!):
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