Plenge Lab
Date posted: December 8, 2015 | Author: | No Comments »

Categories: Uncategorized

My daughter, on a team of fifth grade all-girls from Wellesley MA, recently competed in a First Lego League (FLL) robotics competition. My wife and I served as coaches, which was a demanding but thoroughly rewarding experience. This year’s team got me thinking about design principles for complex systems, as the goal of the annual Challenge is to build from simple (individual Lego pieces) to complex (navigating a robot built from those Lego pieces around a field with missions created from the same Lego pieces) with efficiency and precision.

For those not familiar with FLL, a video link to our team’s performance can be found here. A graphic from Google trends (link here) and the number of views on YouTube (link here) gives you a sense of the magnitude of participation across the world. Overall, FLL is a wonderful example of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) in action. The FLL event also fits very well with evolving views on our educational system, as described in a new documentary “Most Likely To Succeed”.

[Disclaimer: I am a Merck/MSD employee. The opinions I am expressing are my own and do not necessarily represent the position of my employer.

Read full article...