The season ran from September 3rd, 2025 to January 24th, 2026. This year’s theme: Unearthed (archaeology)! Ten fourth and fifth graders, including homeschoolers, participated in 34 hours of hands-on STEAM training. Parent volunteer, Ms. Meghan Langan, shared her experience coaching FIRST Lego League teams in the past and really enhanced the team’s technical focus on meeting judges’ expectations and coding! She also ordered our team shirts and planned our competition day! Unfortunately, I may have annoyed her with my free-build sessions and Mingle Jingle craft times, but I believe I was instrumental in team operations: submitting marketing requests, team sign-up and setup via FIRST Dashboard, room setup with MAFB library books, weekly parent email reminders, and coordinating our on-site archaeological dig and Dr. Watts visit! We, in short, complimented each other. I will never forget her laugh at my excited surprise when we successfully completed our first Lego mission. That was fun!
Each Wednesday from 6-8pm, all students met in the School Liaison Office to work on team-building, researching a problem, solution, and robot programming to complete various lego board missions. Our problem was discussed, but wasn’t solidified until after Ms. Amanda Watts, local archeologist from Minot State University, visited and shared her experiences on digs. Our problem: Under the cover of darkness, raiders take archaeologist’s equipment and tools, so they are unable to complete their excavation. Our creative, military-inspired solution will be on display on January 24th during the all-day robotics competition at MSU!
The season started with many team-building activities. Here are a few: follow-directions/guess drawings activity, balloons-aloft challenge, Lego-build challenge, and hula-hoop relay. Students were reminded to be encouraging, kind, and supportive of each other’s efforts. We routinely started each meeting with these activities and ended each meeting with programming/coding our robot.
Then, the students had a real-time, hands-on archeological dig in the School Liaison Office’s empty flowerbed! We learned various archaeological terms featured in the current ND Heritage Center and State Museum display: grid, units, screening, and lab. We also learned about geophysical survey methods: Ground Penetrating Radar, Electrical Resistance, and Magnetic Gradiometry. I thank my husband for taking our family to see this display so that I could share the information and am truly grateful for his support—always—for my classroom/team activities these past ten years in government service. I also thank Ms. Danielle Smith, USDA Coordinator for Family Child Care, for providing archaeological (gardening) tools!
Next, Ms. Watts shared her field experience in the UK, USA, Turkey, Afghanistan, Rapa Nui, and Egypt. She patiently, expertly, and enthusiastically answered lots of questions! We were lucky to have her visit us at Minot AFB. Thank you, again, Ms. Watts. Your time spent with us was truly valuable and very interesting! You brought us to our educated solution!
After that, team shirts were designed by all students, a vote was conducted, and our winning design was created by Avry Trott! It thoughtfully features a geometric dragon head (our 5th Force Support Squadron’s mascot is a dragon) outlined in white, surrounded by twelve red Legos (representing each team member and both coaches), on a black t-shirt.
Lastly, it was time to hone our programming and presentation skills. Only two students are permitted to be at the board at one time. We have two minutes and thirty seconds to run as many missions as we can and generate points for our team upon successful completion. We practiced transitioning quickly from each pair of two students per mission working on set-up, run, and tear-down of each robot tool and timing the runs. We will be judged on the following four areas: Robot Design, Innovation Project, Robot Performance, and Core Values.
As we head into the competition, we are hopeful of generating points, but more than that, we are better for having had the opportunity to learn more about teamwork, archaeology, and coding. I would be remiss to say this could not have happened without our partnership with Full STEAM Ahead in Minot. We give a big Thank You to them and their organization! We truly are a Great American Defense Community.
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