Tuesdays Are Good

This is a day late, but it was only because I have been busy with work and home life to write until now.  Tuesdays are turning out to be one of the better days of the week.  Anything that follows Monday has to be good.  The morning started off as every other, get up, get kids to school, etc.  At 9:40 AM, a reminder popped up from the Outlook calendar on my work PC, a Google calendar event on my home PC, and a reminder on my Droid. 

What could be so important that it would warrant three separate, redundant alerts?  Billy Gould (@mrgould) and Roddy Bottum (@roddybottum) tweeting the fan club presale link and password for the July 3rd Faith No More concert, of course.  Credit card in hand, I waited for 10 AM to roll around so I could get my tickets.  I got four good seats at the Mann Center in Philadelphia.  Three friends and I will be seeing Faith No More for the first time in over 12 years!  Since I am getting older, I opted for assigned seating instead of the lawn, these old bones need somewhere they can rest every now and then.

Could the day get any better?  Why yes it can!  Shortly after ordering the tickets online, an email popped into Gmail mailbox.  I was being notified that Blockade Billy was officially released and I would be receiving my 1st edition hard cover edition shortly.  This book is extra cool because it is being published by Cemetery Dance, a small publishing company from right here in Maryland.  We are practically neighbors, the company is based less than four miles from my house.  You can read more about Cemetery Dance in an interview of Richard Chizmar by the Baltimore Sun here and also in an interview at Lilja’s Library.

Tuesdays are also my short day at work.  I get out at 3 PM so I can head over to the elementary school to run the Robotics Club.  As I pushed my hand cart down the hall to the media center to start setting up, my good day started to crash.  I saw a whole line of kids standing at the media center door that were not my robotics club kids.  As I got closer, I realized with horror that the media center was completely occupied by photography equipment.  Today was spring picture day.

I parked the cart by the door and tentatively walked in.  I made eye contact with one of the photographers.  I explained my situation, she explained how long it would take them to break everything done and leave.  45 minutes.  I understood that there was nothing that I could do about it.  I was not about to rush these women or give them attitude, they just spent 8 hours taking pictures of an entire elementary school, I could tell by the sweaty faces and thousand yard stares that they were not to be trifled with.  Put simply, with indifference to you Kent, it’s like lasing a stick of dynamite.

I refused to let this set back ruin my day.  What were we going to do with 40 kids between the ages of 5 and 11?  As part of the agreement with the school, we weren’t allowed anywhere else on the premises.  The kids could sense my distress and fear.  Snap off the lights, instantly freezes kids in a school setting.  Sucked for the photographers, who now were groping around in a dimly lit library, but there was a building crisis that needed to be averted.  We gathered the kids in the only open area in the library, a 12” X 12” walled off section used for reading circles.  I distributed some of the WeDo kits to the children and explained that the quieter and more well behaved they were, the quicker the ladies could clear out and we could get to business. 

To my amazement, they did just that.  They all sat down and started working.  I only had to use my Taser two or three times (Just kidding, I did not tase any of the children.  I may want to at times, but that was one of the rules I had to agree to before assuming leadership of the club).  The photographers broke everything down and left in 30 minutes, I think they were a little afraid too.  Every time I made eye contact with one of the photographers, they gave me a look like “You volunteer for this?  God bless you, you crazy sonofabitch.”  We all relocated to the tables and computers without any major issues, except for a few damaged robots.  Hey, they are Lego, they snap right back together.

To top everything off, Tuesday is also Lost night (post forthcoming).  Being the pessimist that I am, I don’t expect things to go my way, but today was one of those pleasant surprises.

Lower Back Pain and WeDo

I spent my Sunday on the floor of the basement.  Why?  I was resorting all Lego WeDo kits for the robotics club.  I sorted over 3,600 Lego pieces into individual piles of similar pieces.  I am the Chairperson of our PTA Robotics Club.  This is our first year and none of us have done this before.  So we are learning as we go along.  One of the most painful lessons to date, is letting the kids mix and match the pieces from the WeDo kits.  So I spent about 6.5 hours on the floor sorting all of the pieces and making complete kits again.  (We'll see how long this lasts...)  I was trying to take regular breaks and stretch my back and legs, but it was pointless.  There was too much to do and little time to do it.  By the end of the day, it was time to give the kids a bath and get them ready for bed and I could barely move. 

But I feel much better after having done it.  The main reason is we can start a new program in the club (the secondary and more controlling reason is my OCD kicking in).  We are going to try rewarding the kids when they complete a project using the WeDo kits or something using the Scratch animation/programming software.  At the end of each meeting, we are going to give the kids who complete a project a small prize.  We'll see if this has a better result in keeping their attention.

The WeDo kits are great.  They are perfect for kids between K and 5th grade and the adults find them pretty fun too.  The kits contain 160 pieces, about 140 of the pieces are the standard Lego pieces.  The remaining pieces are what make it special.  There is one USB interface, one motor, one optical sensor and one motion sensor and a handful of gears and rods that allow you to give your creations motion. 

The kits come with 14 projects that you can build and then program using the WeDo software.  The projects include stuff like an alligator that will close his jaws when you put something between them, a device that spins a top, a boat the rocks back and forth, etc.  Each project takes about 45-60 minutes for someone to put together, so you can build them and get through them in one session.  The building of the each individual project may be too basic for older kids (4th & 5th grade), but the fun for them seems to be programming them.

I'll post some more on the Robotics Club later, including on some of the freestyle projects that we work on and also include what worked and didn't work over the course of the year.