More Observations regarding STOMP

[Originally posted by Joe]

• Kids love wheels. Most of the kids started on the chair exercise by figuring out how to attach wheels to a flat surface. I'm not sure why. I tried to point out that the goal of the project was to build a chair, and that the wheels could come later.
  
• I also note that design sessions at Google often start with the wheels, even though the goal is a chair!
• The handouts we had for the initial activity (building an arch) were hard to read. The graphics were so dark that a key part was nearly invisible.
• We didn't spend enough time teaching kids how to put together the "new style" Lego parts. Most of them tried to attach parts the old way (with stud and hole) rather than the new way (beam and connector).
• Random assignment of kids to teams mostly worked, but we had one team that lagged. One of the boys had difficulty understanding the assignment, and some problems with manual dexterity. The other boy was either bored or unmotivated, and didn't spend much time doing anything other than fooling with parts and singing to himself.
  
• My experience justified my prior belief that we don't pay teachers even half of what they're worth.