Goat Runner Robotics has begun!

First Session: August 24, 2025

Tournament: November 8, 15 or 22nd (TBD)

Space is Limited: Please RSVP ASAP with Brenton

ESSENTIAL-TO-KNOW

What Goat Runner Robotics Team Kids Do

Team Open to 3rd-8th graders. $100.

Meeting Dates, Sundays, 3-5PM (90+% attendance rate expected)

August 24

September 7, (14 or 28, TBD)

October 5, 19, 26

November 2, 9, 16

Potential Tournament Dates, 8-5 (attendance mandatory). TBD, we will not know which for a at least few weeks:

Saturday, November 8 (Broomfield)

November 15 (Metro Denver) OR

November 22 (Golden)

End of Season Dinner (optional)

December 7th, 4-6 PM

We anticipate a team of 10-12 participants. After a couple intro/team building sessions, Gojos will give confidential partner preferences to coaches. Coaches will group team into competing crews of 3-5 Gojos.

We’re competing in the FIRST LEGO League Challenge at a Regional Qualifier in November (at a yet to be assigned date and location). This program is intended for 5th-8th graders, but will allow younger kids to compete.

We are NOT doing the entire program but leaving out the Innovation Project to save time and sanity (given our kiddo ages). This will automatically disqualify us from advancing to the State Tournament in December. (Normally, the top 25% of Qualifier teams advance.)

IDEAL-TO-KNOW

Why Your Kiddo Should do the LEGO Robotics Team

Coding and basic engineering are engaging and useful media for developing problem solving skills. LEGOs are a familiar favorite toy that has evolved to include Spike Prime, a powerful robotics platform that uses motors and sensors of touch, light and ultrasonics.

We will create as best we can, opportunity for success in mastering these technologies…but there is challenge for 10 year olds in sustaining focus and cooperation in these tasks. Especially while “competing” with other teams of 13 and 14 year olds.

…so the lessons we anticipate being of most value for participants, will be about choice…and teamwork. And dealing with success and failure.

How Our Kiddos Will do the LEGO Robotics Team

steamHouse is developing a mentoring model for project and team based activity that has focus on thinking on one’s thinking, relationships and an awareness of one’s actions and effects. Goat Runners will coach from core introductory bits of that curriculum.

Our season team time will be packed with need for technical robotics work…and as you would expect, that will be 90% of our explicit focus. But we will do some explicit brain and teamwork training, too.

Personal Agency through Conscious Thinking

As we have before, we’ll show this video and discuss the famous “Marshmallow Experiment”. Here’s the original researcher, Walter Mischel talking about the experiment’s relevance to “self-control”. We’ll reframe it as a question between your urges for “what you want now” and your larger purposes of “what you want more”.

We’ll do some “brain training”, talking about brain development and psychology’s description of a “System 1” automatic thinking mode, and a “System 2” effortful mode.
We’ll connect to the purposes of a moment (what we want now responding to urges) versus larger purposes (what we consciously want more).

Super Best Bad

The steamHouse curriculum, framework and general programming is intended more for older kids. And so is the FIRST LEGO League Challenge.

Up front, we’ll explain we’re competing with folks who have more life experience and maybe knowledge…and whose brains have developed more.

But we will espouse the benefits of having “super best bad”—which is having and attitude and understanding of “failure”, learning and practice in the context of new tasks. Having a “goat grade great grit” even…

Important Links

This year’s FIRST LEGO League theme is “Unearthed”

The steamHouse Goat Runners Robotics Team page (here)!

FIRST STEM Programs

FIRST LEGO League Challenge (season info)

Colorado FIRST (local tournament info)

Be a Tournament Volunteer in November and/or December

2024 RowBots and 2023 Alphabots

Though designed for grades 4-8, younger ages are allowed. We have equipment and 10+ years experience for this program. For now, we intend to have a fully registered team but only compete with in three of four categories—robot game, robot design and core values. The fourth category, the innovation project is not robot focused and as a research project, would be technically challenging for our seven year olds. We would not be qualified to advance to the state tournament but kids would get tournament experience.

Contact Brenton (brenton@steamhouse.club) if you have interest.

FIRST is a k-12 family of robotics programs that have a tagline touting being “more than robots”. Annually they have a science and society theme, and they give emphasis to teamwork and “core values” of Discovery, Innovation, Impact, Inclusion, Teamwork and Fun.

Brenton coached and served as tournament director for FIRST LEGO League teams when he was at Campus Middle School. So there is familiarity with middle school version of the program (FLL Challenge), but less so with younger aged programs.

We have four Spike Prime robots, and we have 10 EV3 (previous technology) LEGO Robotics kits. We have a few laptops and two game tables. We are fully equipped.

FIRST LEGO League is a sequence of competitive robotics programs. Last year’s FIRST LEGO League theme was Submerged.

We are crews affectionately and unofficially as the Gourds (#694), Melons (#60034), Cucs (#62747), Zucs (#62748)!