How Do You Create “Teamwork”?

Full disclosure. I was not at our team meeting this past Saturday, September 7. I had this crazy idea to go to the home opener of my beloved Cleveland Browns and watch them as they launched their Super Bowl run. That didn’t go as planned, and I’ll stop there. But, if you want a blog post about overcoming failure, then I’ve got decades worth of content. But anyways, to the team… MAPSO Makers!

Yes!!! We have a name! MAPSO is one of the nicknames of the two towns our team resides in, Maplewood and South Orange, NJ. Heated debates say the nickmane should be SOMA (reverse the town names). If you want to debate it, meet me at the Elks Lodge.

Coach Ezzo led a discussion our core values, the community project and robot competition. He then led the team to determine our colors (light blue), three t-shirt design options, and a potentials sponsors list. The team then continued creating the LEGO builds needed for the challenges.

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Over the past few months as we prepared our rookie season, Coach Ezzo and I talked about the team. What it may look like? How would they interact? What would their reaction be to this totally new experience? Would they get along? Would clicks form? Would we be able to control the group!? Would any of them want to code??? There were a few things we knew we wanted: All Girls. All from the same middle school. A mix of backgrounds. And not much coding or robotics experience. We wanted to create empowerment from the ground up.

We’ve started slow as not to overwhelm the team, or ourselves, and I think its working. Coach Ezzo noted that at the end of meeting #2 (and the first meeting for 1/2 the team), some of the team members are gravitating towards certain interests. We have our builders. We have our creative. We have our business types and note takers. We have at least two girls that want to get into coding already! It’ll be our job to nurture these interests and push all the girls into areas they may not like as much. Become comfortable being uncomfortable!

FIRST LEGO League has done a great job this year having team notebooks and engineering guides, along with an intro to one of the robot challenges. Its becoming easier to understand, and will be a great guide for everyone. This has and will help us focus on facilitating the team activities, relieving our weekly schedules of planning, allowing us to adjust on the fly, for me to send out weekly emails to the parents and write this blog, and for Coach Ezzo to take on all the other amazing work he does in our community.

Some of the team got together today to finish the challenge builds. Which is great because that motivates me to finish putting the practice table together.

The agenda is getting set for next week. We’ll work to get aligned on the community project and set goals for the research we need to finalize. We’ll start learning about the robot and how to code. We’ll get a plan for fundraising. There’s a good chance we’ll break the team into to subgroups, which is suggested by FLL, which may help the team focus, reduce the chatter and achieve more in upcoming meetings.

Let’s see where we go! And remember, failure IS an option.