DEI Infiltrated My Son's Lego Robotics League
Victimhood culture, identity politics, and lots of “inclusion”
Dear Coddling Movie Community,
This substack celebrates its first birthday this week (Feb 21), and as a little thanks to all of you I’m offering a free hour of homeschooling consulting to paid subscribers or those who become paid subscribers by this Friday. I know that many of you are curious about homeschooling and I’m hoping the session will help you figure out if the approach might be a good fit for your family.
I’m also offering something else: an hour-long session on independent filmmaking. Plenty of you are interested in this as well, and in this session I’ll answer your questions and cover the main “dos and don’ts.”
The filmmaking session is also free for those who become paid subscribers by Friday. And one more thing—the sessions (filmmaking and homeschooling) are transferable, meaning they could benefit someone close to you.
If you’d like to take me up on one or both of these offers, just send me a private message by Friday.
Now please enjoy the latest essay by LB!
All the best,
Ted
Even as a homeschooler, one has to be wary of current woke ideologies and coddling mentality.
This was my first year as a coach for my son’s little homeschooled lego robotics team. I know nothing about coding or building legos. But I do know my son loves lego robotics, and I suppose he has a knack for it since he was building those large motorized, remote-controlled technic models at seven-years-old. So we started our own team this past season and recruited a few other nearby homeschool kids to participate in the First Lego League Challenge (FLL).
Throughout the season, a team has to build and code a bot and create attachments out of legos to complete certain missions like pulling a lever, raising a pole, or moving something across the board. “Game day” has two parts. In the first, each team has two-and-a-half minutes for its bot to complete as many missions as possible and accrue as many points as possible. Each team gets three rounds at the robot match table and the highest score is recorded.
The second part of the competition is presenting your project (like an invention), which must be related to the current year’s theme, in front of judges. Think science fair with a Q&A afterwards in which teams explain all the research and design.
Behind the Scenes
Since I was the coach, I received all the emails to dial into zoom calls and register the students. Most coaches are middle school teachers since teams are usually created out of schools. This was one of the only times I got to experience what goes on in the school world today. FLL is a great program, but it’s obviously not immune to the spread of woke ideologies that seem to permeate every child-centered institution.
First, when I had to register myself as a coach on the site, there were boxes to check beyond male and female — including nonbinary, and other options. There was also a box to list coaches’ preferred pronouns. My co-coach (another homeschool mom) called me when she was registering and said “Is this for real? Why are they asking this?”
I replied, “I just left it blank.”
The same boxes were listed when registering students. Mind you, this program is for students in grades four through eight.
All coaches and volunteers have to pass a background check to complete their registration. I wonder — if I identified as Xie/Xer — would that flag the background check? I certainly hope so, but I have a feeling it would have qualified me for a coach's award or something. You see, inclusion is one of FLL’s core values, and it’s spouted relentlessly. The other core values are: innovation, discovery, gracious professionalism, teamwork, fun, and impact. These are all wonderful core values, but they were pushed down our throats throughout the season. Teams had to incorporate these key words throughout their presentation to ensure a high score.
Up until last year, the robot match—the number of points a team scored during the competition round— accounted for 50% of a team’s total score. Think of a space rocket coming back to Earth and landing correctly into the launch tower. It either nails the landing or does not, and it’s very clear to see. The mission attempted is either successful or not. There is no in-between.
This is precisely what I enjoy about FLL — the kids get immediate feedback. They see if their bot and code worked or not, and it all happens during a live, high-pressure competition. Isn’t this what real-world engineering is about? Did it work? Is it repeatable? Can your bot and code deliver actual results?
You see the same idea unfold with a Mars rover — can it pick up a sample and bring it back down to Earth or did the team spend billions of dollars building a dud?
The other 50% of a team’s score is based on how the team’s presentation is judged. Here a team’s score relies heavily on peppering the core value words throughout the presentation. The idea is to show the judges that the kids are having so much fun being innovative and inclusive.
Also by LB
Sexual Propaganda Comes to Young Adult Fiction: I don’t want my son reading about fragility and unhealthy sexuality
Battle Hymn of the Homeschool Mother: How I Went from “Model Minority” to Member of the Counterculture
When Victimhood Culture Corrodes the Asian-American Experience
Not Quite Competition
There is no smack talk in FLL. That would not be exhibiting gracious professionalism. While I am all for good sportsmanship, sometimes having a specific rival to beat is what spurs one on to work harder and achieve more. FLL actually doesn’t use the word competition because organizers don’t want to promote a winner-vs-loser mindset. They say it’s a “coopertition.” Ooookay.
The teams with the top scores move on to higher competition levels – Qualifiers, Regionals, States, and finally Worlds.
This past year, the scoring rubrics changed. Now, the robot match scores account for only 25% of a team’s total score and judging/presentation weighs 75%. So teams that build and code a fantastic bot that accomplish a lot of missions successfully still may not advance to the next round if their presentation is just so-so. But a team with a poor robot match score can still advance if they have a good judging round.
I have mixed feelings about this. Is this how the real world works? Your product may not deliver results, but if you have a great pitch, you still get funding? (Actually, this does sound a lot like the government and public schools.)
Excluding Boys is Inclusive?
Our first event of the season was a practice scrimmage.
It didn’t count for anything but merely allowed teams to come and “cooperpete”(?) with an early robot design and code and ask FLL organizers questions about how the season would unfold. Before the event started, the FLL event organizers asked all the girls on all FLL teams to go outside for a photo-op. They wanted to take a picture of all the girl coders to celebrate girls in STEM. At that time, we did have a girl on our team but she didn’t want to go outside for the picture.
Maybe she felt weird to be singled-out like that simply because she was a girl. Or maybe she just thought of herself simply as a team member, not a “girl coder.”
When he heard about the special photo-op, my son’s eyes rolled hard. He hates it when they neglect the boys and celebrate people not out of achievement, but simply out of being. Middle schoolers can smell the difference between a participation trophy and real winning. Praise for mediocrity stinks. Winning from merit and hard work is sweet and delicious.
They didn’t ask for a picture of the boys. Nor did they take a picture of all the teams together — that would have been unifying, wouldn’t it? That would have been more inclusive.
Accommodation Letters?
Our little rookie team passed the Qualifying round and made it to Regionals! We were so excited, but then I noticed something odd.
The registration form for the regional competition included this question:
Does your team have any special needs/considerations that the judges should know about? Please provide details. Do NOT include any names.
What is this? An accommodation letter?
I had overheard at the event that this is where a coach can explain if one needs to mention certain "challenges" students face during the presentation round. Frankly, I was shocked to see the question — a place to list your potential excuses.
And it wasn’t terribly easy to avoid. The Google Form required coaches to type something into every box. So I wrote the first thing that came to my mind — that one of our team members left mid-season so our team had to readjust our robot match strategy for three people at the table instead of the usual four.
Maybe I should have simply typed “no” and nothing more. But I fell victim to the whole “tell us why you’re special” campaign too. Based on the culture of FLL, I thought if this is the game they’re playing, I should give my team every advantage and play along.
It wasn’t until I started drafting this essay that I realized I did have a team member that could be considered special needs. He is dyslexic and has ADHD, but those factors never come to mind when I see him. He is simply my son’s best friend. Does it actually serve anything to tell the judges about his dyslexia and ADHD? I do wonder what other coaches and teachers wrote for this question.
RELATED
Surprisingly, our rookie team advanced to States!
But maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise. The top 15 teams advance to the state competition and our team’s robot match scores were consistently in the top 15 (out of 40-plus teams). We also had a great presentation round.
The actual surprise was that a team that got the highest robot match score at regionals (a team that went to Worlds last year) did not get selected to automatically advance to States. That team merely scored one of the alternate spots.
Did equity have something to do with the outcome?
This was a veteran team, which I’m sure had a decent presentation round too because they know exactly what to expect and do for FLL. Did the judges not want the same winners attending states? Another team in our region scored in the bottom 5 (!) in the robot match, and that team did advance to States. Is this the kind of outcome FLL was hoping for when it changed the scoring rubrics?
I don’t want to sound harsh, but my son joined FLL to practice building and coding, not to practice presenting a core value-laden pitch.
After a few days of deliberation, our little rookie team decided to bow out of States. Our team didn’t want to endure the hassle of scheduling and logistics required to compete yet again in another city. Our robot match score wasn’t the top one or two and there wasn’t enough time to rebuild or recode. And the boys didn’t want to do more research on their project, which would have been required if we wanted a chance to actually advance to Worlds. When we declined the invitation, that highest-scoring veteran team did get to attend after all.
As for next season, we will probably participate again.
My son and his friends enjoyed it overall and felt a great sense of accomplishment getting so far as a new team. They did it all on their own as I do not know how to code or build. I didn’t teach them anything, but merely kept them on track so meetings wouldn’t completely revert to wrestling matches or fart competitions as things tend to do with 11-year-old boys.
I do hope FLL will revert to the old scoring system, because doesn’t real-world success require delivering actual results?
 | A guest post by
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I think First is an amazing organization overall, but it’s frustrating that they don’t understand the corrosive force their attempts to “help“ protected classes actually cause. My daughter is the only girl on her team and thanks to all their efforts to "promote diversity" it puts a ton of pressure on her and her team as they have to keep pushing her forward to show their "commitment to gender equity." She has to keep hunting the school to pressure more girls to join the team so they'll be eligible for advancement. Which is creepy and makes them less likely to join ("Hello fellow kids. You have just the kind of genitals our robotics team requires!"). They even made her team captain as a sophomore, so now she has the burden of a leadership position over a bunch of boys that are older and more experienced than her. She & they all know why she got the captain position and they know they can't say anything about it. If the people at First spent 10 seconds thinking about how all this focus on diversity tokenizes the people they claim they want help they would realize they're not helping anybody.
So far engineering is one field where all this "woke" hullabaloo hasn't seeped in. Sure, you see the occasional pronouns in an e-mail signature (strangely, it's always the pronouns you'd expect given the person's name/avatar). Mostly we just sit around and talk about exciting stuff like the statement of work or whether or not we meet the requirements. When we're not doing that, we're designing, coding, and analyzing. Unfortunately for these FLL kids, they're not getting a glimpse of what actual engineering looks like. Sounds like an attempt to excite kids to pursue STEM is going to turn them off through a system of unfair competition.