Mack Academy Weblog

This is an invitation to encourage our homeschool robotics team in the 2006 FIRST Robotics competition. My daughter, Amy, contributed to this post:

I'm excited! We have just started our first official day of LEGO Robotics 2006.

Our robotics team, the The LEGO Mountaineers is an all-girls home school robotics team. We have been competing in the FIRST Robotics competitions for the past 4 years. FIRST stands for For Inspiration And Recognition of Science and Technology. Its a great way to learn to apply skills in critical thinking, problem solving, math, science, computers, and robotics. It's fun, too.

Today, we finished making our first mind map for the 2006 FIRST Competition.

We use mind maps in all of our planning and we make maps often help us keep track of our goals, projects, ideas, and questions. This will also make it easier for us to keep track of what we have accomplished. Below, is a link to the mind map we made. I believe that it is because of our mind mapping and GTD planning skills that we were able to successfully plan, prepare, and win the Director's Award at two different competitions.

Our robotics team had a challenging season last year; we had to move up north for six months to care for my grandma who had a stroke. We are back now, and we plan to have a more active robotics season this year. Two of our team members have moved on. Fortunately, we have gained two new members. This year, my two younger sisters will join our team.Emily is old enough to participate with everything on the team, Kelly is a bit young so she will participate with everything except competing with the robot. We are excited to have them on our team and I hope that they get a great experience.

Our goal this year, is to make it all the way to the national competition, in Atlanta Georgia. Our first step is to win the Director's award at a state competition. This is our last year to complete in this league and we plan to work very hard.

We are looking for sponsors and contributions for our team. In 2004, we were fortunate to have, as sponsors, The David Allen Company, MindJet, Gyronix, DominoBlog and The Microsoft OneNote team. We hope that some of these and other sponsors will join us again this year to help us reach our goal of getting to the national competition.

My sister, Wendy and I will be mind mapping and blogging about our experiences, You can follow our team adventures on our team blog (coming soon!) and on our homeschool site.

Thank you.
Amy Mack

There you have it. I'm going to unhook for the day to work on robots with the team. It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it. :-)

If you would like to help the girls with a contribution or a company sponsorship: send me an email and Amy or Wendy will send you their sponsor/contributor invitation letter. I'm teaching them how to raise funds for their team and how to be responsible in recognizing their sponsors who make the team possible. (See our past sponsors.) If you are unable to sponsor, perhaps you'll consider helping the girls by sharing the link to their blog or posting a word of encouragement.

If you would like to learn why I enjoy teaching this program and what I call, "Productivity in Motion," click here.

If you would like to read about some of our past robotics adventures, click here.

If you would like to start your own robotics team, it's not too late! (Hint to Team Sampson; Mac software available.) I would be happy to discuss this with you and point you to resources. The first place to start is to check out the girl's blog and follow the link in the banner to FIRST.