Have We Inspired A Future Engineer?

1/29/2011 - Shannon Park Lego League Showcase @ RMS

Yesterday, I had the privilege of hosting the Shannon Park Lego League Showcase at Rosemount Middle School.  The event was rescheduled from last December, due to a snowstorm.  I am glad we had the opportunity to have the event, even with the long delay.  Our attendance was down a little bit, but for those who made it, a good time was had.

I have been at this for three seasons now, as you can see in my blog site.  It started from some inspiration from Dr. Dean Kamen in the spring of 2008, and today my focus changes to getting a competitive team organized next fall (assuming my son Jacob is still interested).  My thought process in 2008 was trying to build an equivalent of an in-house program, which in theory is designed to reach a broad audience to start, then move to a more focused and competition-ready program (akin to traveling sports) once the foundation is in place.

After leaving the event yesterday, I believe the foundation is there at Shannon Park Elementary.  It is now up to someone else to pick it up and move it forward.  I am ready to start phase two, as described above.

The big question, which will remain unanswered for some time, is “By starting this program, did we inspire a young engineer of the future?”  I would like to think so, but only time will tell.  In my closing remarks to the Showcase attendees yesterday, I encouraged them to never stop asking the “What If?” question.  Maybe, just maybe, this effort will yield an innovation of the future that will improve our lives.

I took my shot on making a big play here.  We’ll have to wait and see if it was indeed a big play.  On to the next one!

Big Play: Raising Your Profile

I am not the kind of person that likes doing the same thing over and over again.  Add the expectation of a different result and then you define insanity.  Yes, I know, there are certain things we have to do repeatedly, like take out the trash.  I’m talking about the causes in life that really matter, like career, marriage and family.  As we evolve in these life journeys, there are times that some intelligent risk taking to move the cause forward with the intent of making for a better life for myself and others.  I had a situation a couple of weeks ago that I decided to try to raise the stakes a little bit.  Let me try to describe it a little bit.

 

Margo Relaxing in Her Favorite Spot

 

I was shopping at our local big-box pet store a couple of weeks ago.  En route to the register with sixty pounds of cat food on my shoulder, I ran into the principal of my son’s school, Shannon Park Elementary.  He has been a great supporter of my efforts to develop our Lego League program.  I decided to stop and ask him for some more support in my quest to transition the program leadership to someone else, so I could focus next year on building the competitive Lego League program.  He was quick to offer some great suggestions for ways to engage, and the best one was the idea to contact the local paper to do a story about what we accomplished.  Two emails the next day, and we got the interview scheduled.  This previous post talks more about the interview.

Here is the final story for the paper.  I am very proud of the coverage we got out of the experience, and I am hopeful by raising the profile of our program in Rosemount I can inspire more people to get involved to inspire science and technology pursuits with our children.

In this case, we will see if taking the initiative to raise the program’s profile will pay off for me to transition leadership of this program to the next person.  I have some more thoughts about profile raising — stay tuned for future posts.

Shannon Park Lego League In The News

Getting The Story For The Town Pages

Today we were visited by Nathan, the editor of the Rosemount Town Pages.  He visited the Shannon Park Lego League practice to see what is going on with our program.  We spent about 30 minutes together discussing the great things going on with our young inventors.  We saw a few demos from our 4th and 5th graders and their robots, plus a visit with the Groovy Skeletons team of 3rd graders.  I do not have information to share as to when this will be in the Town Pages, but I will post it when I get it.

Thanks to Mr. Guthrie, who facilitated the meeting.  This will be great exposure for our program in the community.

Inspiration for Lego League: Dean Kamen

I remember the day like it was yesterday.  I got tapped by my boss at the last minute to attend the annual Science and Technology banquet at a hotel in Minneapolis.  It was a rainy April night — I mean REALLY rainy.  The traffic from 3M to downtown Minneapolis was downright hideous.  You get the idea.

After presentations by faculty and introduction of scholarship winners, the keynote speaker was introduced: Dean Kamen.  His talk fundamentally changed me.  He spoke of our problems as to why we are falling back in our science and math rankings worldwide.  His proposed solution was to energize science and technology activities in our schools rather than to demonize sports and entertainment pursuits.  In other words, he’s taken a play from their playbook in the creation of FIRST organization that spawned Lego League at the national level.

After hearing the talk that night, I started my mission to do my part to inspire science and technology activities with my kids and our school.  I approached Mr. Guthrie shortly after, and it was a pretty easy sell to create the partnership to start our Lego League at Shannon Park.

Given that our topic this season is about biomedical engineering (Body Forward), I am including Dr. Kamen’s recent TED talk.  It will give you a sense of the experience I felt that night with a keen focus on his current activities around engineering solutions for our veterans who are coming home from war in really bad shape.  Our battlefield medicine has become so effective that soldiers are now surviving wounds from war more frequently than in years past.  It’s both a sad and exhilirating story.  I hope you find it as meaningful as I did, and provide you inspiration to energize our kids through Lego League.  If we can inspire a young scientist, maybe they can contribute in efforts unimaginable to us today.

Another Season of Lego League Begins!

Here we go again.  Another season of Lego League at Shannon Park.  It was refreshing and renewing for me to see such a strong interest in the program again in 2010.  We had a great mix of new parents in attendance as well as some veterans.  I have to say, it gets me going in a positive way.

Jacob at the 2009 Lego League Showcase

The challenge this year looks interesting as well — engineering meets medicine.  The kids will learn a little about biomedical engineering and why it is important.  This will be fun for me as this is a world I live in at 3M.  I can’t wait to see what ideas the kids dream up as they go through the challenge.

Leadership Lesson – Getting To The End

In the experience of starting the brand new Lego League program at my kids’ school, I learned an important lesson about leadership when starting something brand new.  This lesson I call “Getting to the End.” 

When you are starting something new, it’s not a big shock that there are more questions than answers, colleagues that will create roadblocks to success (either subtlety or not so much), challenges that emerge that were not planned or self-doubt about your ability to lead the team through the process.  As a leader, it’s important to the team following you that you do not allow these obstacles to become a distraction to the larger goal.  In my case, the goal was to complete the first season of Lego League and to have a showcase event to wrap up the season. 

I noticed a few key elements about what happened to me as a leader through the process.  The first was passion around the objective.  I had a pretty clear picture that I had of the end state, and I was determined to see it through.  I repeated this vision often to my team of volunteers.  The vision became contagious, and the team definitely pulled together to deliver a great event!

The second was effectively delegating responsibility and trusting those delegates to deliver.  As a control freak, this was hard for me.  With this size of an effort, I found out that delegation was an absolute necessity.  Plus, people are more than willing to help if they know what you want done.  Once you do that delegation, you have to let go and let them be accountable for the result.  In my case, I had a great group of volunteers and they convinced me early on to back off and let them handle the small details.  The net result was a fantastic  event and a group of volunteers who felt really good about the outcome.  I remember how great I felt after it was all over.

So, getting to the end is probably the most important thing when starting a new venture.  The learnings and insights gained during the journey will make the second iteration go so much better if you can avoid the distractions and keeping the eye on the prize.