Creative Kids

This weekend (Friday and Saturday) I had the opportunity to participate in two fun programs related to kids and engineering. The first, "National Engineers Week" is a week dedicated to promoting careers in Engineering, Math, and Science to school-aged kids across the country. IBM is a big supporter of this program, and actually does this for a whole month instead of just a week. IBM has a core team of people to come up with a project and school presentation, and coordinate and organize the employees to volunteer to go to schools and do the presentation and projects, as well as gives the "time off" for employees who choose to go to the schools. They are also very flexible as to letting people choose what schools they go to. The Rochester-area schools are always covered, but many people also choose to go back to their home towns all over the midwest and do presentations.

Every year for the past 7 years, I have driven to Blair-Taylor Elementary School in Blair, WI, and done these presentations to 5th and 6th grade classes there, with my friend Leah, who used to work at IBM and now works for Rockwell-Collins, which also participates in the Engineers Week program. Leah's mom is a teacher at Blair-Taylor and Leah grew up there. This makes it an especially fun event for me every year - getting to hang out with my friend Leah, combining both of our experiences from different companies, and getting to go to the same place every year - the teachers love to have us come, and the kids remember us from year to year (the 6th graders remember us very well from the previous year when we came to their 5th grade class). The last 2 projects have been particularly good and have generated a lot of enthusiasm and creativity - last year's project was to build a roller coaster (which every group loved and was successful doing) and this year's project was to build a Rube Goldberg machine (check out the YouTube video below this paragraph - an amazing never-released Honda commercial depicting one of these machines). This was a little more of a stretch than previous years, because each of the 5 groups had to build a piece of this "machine" that had to work together in the end, so they not only had to work with the kids in their own group, but also with the groups on either side of them. It was a great success - I was so surprised at how well everyone worked together, and how little fighting or arguing there was (and these are 5th and 6th graders - the teachers were VERY amazed as well). Kinda makes you wonder how much less fighting and arguing we'd have in the world if we all just had cool stuff to work on (but I digress....)



After Leah's parents feeding me dinner (they always go out of their way to make my favorites!) I unfortunately had to zip back home and get to bed early, because I had to be at Willow Creek middle school at 7:00am to set up and learn how to be a judge for the Destination ImagiNation SE Minnesota regional tournament. I had never done this before, but my friend Scott asked if I'd like to give it a try. Different age groups of kids (HS, MS, 3rd-5th, and K-2nd) are given a set of project/problem constraints which they get to work on for a couple of months, and then present their "solution" at this contest. The constraints for the one I was judging were to design an obstacle course (obstacles of varying degrees given various point values), a vehicle to traverse the obstacles, and in conjunction, a nonverbal skit which the obstacles were themed from. To give you an example, one of the groups made up a story about a guy "Dude" in San Francisco, who drinks too much root beer, goes crazy, and has to make it home - the obstacles were palm trees, the golden gate bridge, mountains, and some others. The team gets points for (in 8 minutes) how many obstacles their vehicle gets through, as many laps as they can do. They also get points for obstacle difficulty, vehicle design, obstacle relevance to the story, story creativity, and some made up "side trips" they can take. It was fun because each group was totally different - the constraints are intentionally vague and leave lots of room for interpretation.

By the time I got home at 1:00pm on Saturday, I was glad to just be able to lay down on the couch and relax for awhile :) Erin and I have been enjoying a nice relaxing Sunday today (he couldn't resist doing some baking - baguettes, and cheese cake).

Other Updates

I'm in week 3 of trumpet lessons - I can (almost) play 2 scales now reliably, and have gotten up to the 3rd-space "C" in the staff, although sometimes I wonder how in the world I'll go higher than that as it feels like my head will explode (teacher Warren assures me it's just a matter of training the lip to do it). No upcoming salsa band or jazz band gigs, although the salsa band is probably going to be involved in a "Rochester's Latin Idol" contest at the Blue Moon sometime in April or May. Really excited about what we're doing for handbells for Easter, as we decided to have a combined Jubilate-Accelerando group, meaning we'll have enough people to play the really tough stuff :)

I don't do ALL music all the time (although a lot right now) - I've also managed to get in a few card nights, and hope to see the family up north next weekend. And I'm very much into the presidential election (probably too much), listening to podcasts and reading news - hoping it doesn't get too ugly. I'm at least more optimistic about the candidates than I have been in years.