VEX Robotics here we come.

I learned about VEX when we were first staying in Ireland, hoping to remain to live and work. It’s a child-centered engineering and design platform that is competitive and offers an impressive list of benefits for any students, especially I would argue, homeschooled students. Understanding that our return to Ireland was a lot of start and stop, uncertainty and changed plans until suddenly- we were here; I really hadn’t planned on delving into VEX this year. Not until we were long after the point where I became dissatisfied with the children’s engagement with their life sciences program (due to limitations of place and opportunity to be hands-on) did I finally realize we should just go for it. We attended a tournament and talked to the coaches who again and again said, “just get them started”. So here we are, started late in the season but we aren’t here for world domination. We won’t be able to compete for the trophies in STEM labs that I didn’t have time to pull together and they have little chance of winning awards for furthering design elements that they have been introduced to so recently, namely- robot building and coding but we are here, in the arena. We take Zaptrode, our robot to it’s first competition this coming Thursday and we have been told that it is the most competitive arena in Ireland. As always, I am very transparent about the nature of what we are engaging upon and I believe we will share this and come out stronger. For us what matters is that we get out there, into a high stress arena, where the children need to think on their feet and problem solve in front of others. I have told them this is absolutely about failing and publicly failing and seeing our successes and in the middle of the stress keeping our heads to see how we can do better next time and to always, always- hold gratitude in our hearts for the opportunity to exhaust ourselves in pursuit of dreams and goals that call to us. Send your prayers to us for the children to be in good health and good spirits this coming Thursday!

Above is the article that I was unable to post before the tournament as life got quite busy. I can’t wait to post the follow up!