Friday, October 2, 2009

Great intro video for FLL Smart Moves Research Project

I came across this video made by LEGO artist Sean Kenney on the nxtstep blog (thanks Martyn!) and think this will be a great introduction to my team's discussion on this year's FLL research project.

Teams are challenged to look at their community and discover how people, animals, information, and things travel. They need to research one main mode of transportation and investigate:

1. What kinds of problems keep people and things from getting where they are going safely?

2. What kind of problems keep people and things from moving efficiently, getting where they are going quickly and using the least amount of energy?

3. How could your team help solve one of those problems?

I am planning to use this video as a model research project and having the team role play as FLL judges. After showing the video I will ask some critical questions to get the team thinking about how they will approach their own project. Questions like:

1. What mode of transportation was researched?
2. What kinds of problems does it cause?
3. How does this mode of transportation effect our energy resources?
4. How is this video helping solve this problem?
5. If you were a judge and this was a team's presentation, what would you want to ask the team?