Ed Notes Online: Robotics Brooklyn FIRST LEGO League Tournament for Kids 9-14 at NYU/Poly Saturday Jan. 14

Friday, January 13, 2012

Robotics Brooklyn FIRST LEGO League Tournament for Kids 9-14 at NYU/Poly Saturday Jan. 14

Free and open to the public. NYU/Poly is on Jay Street at Metrotech.

Tomorrow (Saturday, Jan. 14) is the opening of the NYC robotics competition season with the qualifying tournament with over 40 teams from Brooklyn competing for the opportunity to go on to the finals at the Javits Convention Center in March where 80 teams winnowed from all the borough qualifiers will compete for the opportunity to go to the finals at the World Tournament with teams from around the globe in St. Louis in April.

Attending these events -- bring your kids --- is a great way to get your school involved next year. I will be manning the registration desk in the morning.

Yesterday I finished building the Field Set Up Kit just in time for the tournament. I had LEGO parts all over my man cave for weeks as each night I built another model. If you think that was easy check out the models on Facebook.

I've been involved with FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition in Science and Technology) since retiring in 2002. FIRST puts on various tournaments for kids from age 6-high school all over the world.

My focus has been the FIRST LEGO League, where teams of kids from age 9-14 (which includes elementary, middle and high schools) build and program robots out of LEGO materials. That makes for an interesting competition with 4th/5th graders competing on the same playing level as 9th graders. (And they

do pretty well.) There are over 16,000 teams world wide with 8000 in the states.

Here in NYC we had around 180 teams register in September. We expect around 150 to take part in the borough qualifiers

The teams had over these months to prepare their robots for 4 shots throughout the day at completing a number of tasks within two and a half minutes. In addition, the teams have to do presentations in front of a panel of judges.

Each year there is a theme. This year it is Food Factor.

Some Food Factor Links

2011 Food Factor Challenge | FIRST LEGO League

firstlegoleague.org/challenge/2011foodfactor
The FLL Core Values are the fundamental elements that ... In the 2011 Food Factor Challenge, over 200000 9-16* year olds from over 55 countries will explore ...

FLL 2011 "Food Factor" Robot Game EN - YouTube
► 8:21► 8:21	www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvdTbTf4G0kSep 5, 2011 - 8 min - Uploaded by FLLHot This film explains missions and points of FLL Robot-Game 2011 "Food Factor - Keeping Food Safe". Please ...

FLL 2011 Food Factor Missions - YouTube
► 8:21► 8:21	www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf_bQbPYLT8Sep 3, 2011 - 8 min - Uploaded by bgcalbanyor These are the missions for this year's Lego Robotics Tournament.

FLL Project DVD - Food Factor season - YouTube
► 20:44► 20:44	www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFBBnyz8syMJun 27, 2011 - 21 min - Uploaded by FLLGlobal The OFFICIAL FLL Project DVD for the 2011 Food Factor season. A rookie team's guide to the FLL Project ...

NYC Qualifiers Begin: Volunteers Needed

Hello, FLL FOOD FACTOR SEASON is in FULL EFFECT. We are holding Borough Tournaments all over the Tri-state area and we NEED YOUR HELP. Below are the DATES/LOCATIONS/ SITE COORDINATOR info for you to choose from. I beg you to please respond to the specific SITE COORDINATOR and copy me at ealmonte311@gmail.com with the following info: Name, Email address, Telephone
FLL Volunteer Position – 1^st & 2^nd Choices. Note:
You need to have been TRAINED for REFEREE or JUDGE in order to be able to volunteer in any of the these two positions. We need PLENTY OF VOLUNTEERS, please spread the news and have your friends and family join us if they can.
BOROUGH TOURNAMENT DATES BELOW:

Saturday Jan. 14th Brooklyn Qualifier @ NYU-Poly
Coordinator: Susan Hermon - shermon@poly.edu

Saturday Jan.21st Bronx Qualifier @ Lehman HS
Coordinator: Bernie DiCristofalo – bdicrist@optonline.net

Saturday Jan. 21st Manhattan Qualifier @ CCNY
Coordinator: Elizabeth Vilchis – Vilchis.elizabeth@gmail.com

Saturday Jan. 28th Queens Qualifier @ George Ryan JHS 216
Coordinator: Peter Xanthus – ptx79@aol.com

Staten Island Qualifier : Feb 5 is Super Bowl - Target date is Feb. 12 if venue can be found.
Coordinator: Thomas Smolka – thomasjsmolka@gmail.com
List of teams competing in Brooklyn

Team [x] Object (home schooled)

St. Edmunds Elementary School

PS 94 K

PS 321K

Packer Collegiate Inst.

PS 8 K

YWCA-NYC

MS 366K

Community Partnership Charter School

MS 354 School of Integrated Learning

PS 270 K The Dekalb School

Brooklyn Brownstone School

Mott Hall Bridges Academy

PS 3K The Bedford Village School

PS 256K Benjamin Banneker Elementary

PS 9K Teunis G. Bergen

PS 399 K Stanley Eugene Clarke

PS 233K Langston Hughes

PS 11K Purvis J Behan School

MS 113K Ronald Edmonds Learning Center

PS 636 K Young Scholars’ Academy for Discovery and

Urban Assembly Institute of Math & Science for Young Women

Ocean Hill Collegiate Charter School

The Young Womens’ Leadership School TYWLS BK

Benjamin Banneker Academy K

PS 58 The Carroll School

Salve Regina Catholic Academy

PS 261K

PS 321K

Sunset Park Prep MS 821K

IS 383 K
Philippa Schuyler MS

MS 354 School of Integrated Learning

PS 372 K

Brooklyn School for Global Studies

Fort Green Prep Academy

PS 147k

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"A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

What media call "philanthropy" for the public schools are actually seed monies to establish a private "market" in publicly-financed education - an enterprise worth trillions if successfully penetrated by corporate America. Cory Booker, one of the "New Black Leaders" financed by the filthy rich, is key to creating a "nationwide corporate-managed schools network paid for by public funds but run by private managers.

"Ed Reformers" want to cash in on public education and to control its content and outcome, not improve it. Provide great education? Baby boomers had as close as this country has ever gotten to it when we were growing up. The Ed Reform Movement has no interest in seeing such a well-educated, democratically astute population ever again.

http://blackagendareport.com/content/cory-booker-clear-and-present-threat-public-education

History of the UFT Pre-Weingarten Years

This award-winning series of articles by Jack Schierenbeck originally appeared in the New York Teacher in 1996 and 1997.

Naturally, from a certain point of view. But, despite certain biases, Schierenbeck, a great guy, was one of the best NY Teacher reporters so this is worth reading. Jack suffered a debilitating stroke many years ago (I used to get secret donations to ed notes from him through a 3rd source.)

This chapter looks interesting:

Class struggles: The UFT story, part 3

“The schism in the union over radical politics [is] a major reason for stalling the growth of a teacher union for decades.” Revolutionary politics and ideology take center stage, as the original Teachers Union becomes a battlefield, pitting leftist against leftist and splitting the union.

Clarence Taylor's "Reds at the Blackboard" focused on the old Teachers Union which disbanded in 1964 after suffering from anti-left attacks.

Of course for another view, check out the review at New Politics of the Kahlenberg Bio on Shanker by Vera Pavone and me: Albert Shanker: Ruthless Neocon

Effective Union Organizing

A video series put together by Jason Mann from the British Columbia Federation of Teachers about social media and how to use it for effective union organizing.

The first series was called New Media For Union Activists Roadmap and it's still available on-line at:
http://www.newmediabootcamp.ca/welcome/
I watched some of them and need to rewatch as they are loaded with information.

The second series started last week and it's called "Online Campaigning for Union Activists"

You can sign up for this free series at :
http://act.bcfed.ca/online-campaigning-for-union-activists/

You Don't Have A Choice - Join the Revolt

Ex-Harlem Success Teacher Comments on Eva the Diva

Ex-HSA Teacher has left a new comment on your post "Fear and Loathing at Evil's Harlem Success Empire ...":

I am a former Harlem Success teacher. Not many people who work/worked for her like her very much. I once made the comment that she is very nice when I first was hired. Two of her closest colleague responded immediately almost in unison, "Eve is not nice!" Over time I realized that there was a lot of political games going on. Another colleague once said to me that he was tired of "being part of a political campaign." Sending out 15,000 applications for only 400 seats in a school is reprehensible. The money that paid for those mass mailings could have paid the yearly salary of another teacher not to mention the heartache of all those parents who applied but did not get a spot. She does good work trying to give disadvantaged students a quality public school education but at a great cost to staff AND the school's educational budget! school budget.

Davis Guggenheim Compared to Riefenstahl

“Waiting for Superman" is the second most intellectually dishonest piece of documentary work I have seen. It is surpassed only by Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will," the pro-Hitler propaganda classic, in that regard. Uses personal narratives of adorable children to create narrative suspense that overrides public policy discussion with pure emotion in unscrupulous attack on teachers and their unions, among others

Timothy Tyson
Professor of African American Studies and History
Duke University

How Teaching Experience Makes a Difference

Even as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Rhee and others around the nation are arguing for experienced teachers to be laid off regardless of seniority, every single study shows teaching experience matters. In fact, the only two observable factors that have been found consistently to lead to higher student achievement are class size and teacher experience, so that it’s ironic that these same individuals are trying to undermine both.
- Leonie Haimson on Parents Across America web site

Full article with charts here.

Weingarten/Gates Foundation announce drone-driven teacher evaluation

According to a press release issued by the Gates Foundation, the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, these three have entered a ground-breaking partnership to evaluate teachers utilizing the drone technology that has revolutionized warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. A bird-size device floats up to 400 feet above a classroom and instantly beams live video of teachers in action to agents at desks at Teacher Quality Inspection Stations established by the AFT and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

When asked if the drones were authorized to drop bombs on teachers who exhibit inadequacy, Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, replied, "Don't be ridiculous. Gates money puts other methods at our disposal."

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.5-million-member American Federation of Teachers said the powerful union has signed on to the drone project...

More at Substance

The Real Reason Behind Push for Standardized Tests: It's All About the Adults

On standardized testing in our schools

A must read article about the standardized test industry.
Written by an insider who has worked as a test scorer, the article outlines a multinational industry based on an army of temporary workers paid by the piece at $0.30 to $0.70 per test, translated in the need to grade 40 tests per hour to make a $12 salary. The article goes on to show how the companies gauge the grading "results" based on the need to ensure new contracts to continue profiting off of our youth. The original article is from Monthly Review. Here it is on Schools Matter blog.

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/12/on-growing-use-of-corporate-test.html

Parallels between America today and Germany in the 1920's and early 30's

"Resentment and obstruction are all the right wing in America have to peddle. Their policies are utterly discredited. Their ideology - even by its own standards - is a sham. They are so bereft of leaders, their de facto leader is a former drug addicted, thrice-divorced radio talk show host. That is literally the best they can muster. But they have built a national franchise inciting the downwardly mobile to blame the government, not the right, for their problems, exactly as Hitler did in the 1920s."

The US Is Facing a Weimar Moment

Published on Sunday, March 15, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

Chicago View of Unity/UFT on Charters

After many meetings and debates, the Chicago delegation succeeded in working with the New York United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 (UFT) to push the AFT to take stronger stands on charter school accountability and school closings — though many delegates from Chicago would have liked the language to have been even stronger.

Generally speaking, the New York delegation represented organizing charters as the best model for handling their role in reshaping unions, despite the fact that according to many reports few charter schools in New York have been organized as is the case in Chicago. This logic is the same touted by the Progressive Caucus of the AFT. The few that have been organized are a part of the UFT local though they have separate contracts negotiated with the help of UFT. The Chicago delegation reflection the mindset that allowing new charters to continue to proliferate while attempting to organize existing charters is an end game in which public schools and the union lose.

Jen Johnson, CTU, Local 1 in Substance

Ed Notes Greatest Hits: HSA Rally and Founding of GEM

SEE MY VIDEO ON HARLEM SUCCESS RALLY 2009:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEp7rg_L5JI

Angel Gonzalez and I attended that rally and used the footage to promote our conference on Mar. 28, 2009, which is where the concept of a group like GEM emerged. Until then we had basically been a committee of ICE working with the NYCORE high stakes testing group. The actions of Eva and crew helped spawn GEM. Mommie Dearest!!

I have more video somewhere. I was hoping to get Leni Riefenstahl to edit it but she died. We would have called it "Triumph of the Hedge Fund Operators."

Ed Notes Online

Ed Notes Extended

Friday, January 13, 2012

Robotics Brooklyn FIRST LEGO League Tournament for Kids 9-14 at NYU/Poly Saturday Jan. 14

Some Food Factor Links

2011 Food Factor Challenge | FIRST LEGO League

FLL 2011 "Food Factor" Robot Game EN - YouTube

FLL 2011 Food Factor Missions - YouTube

FLL Project DVD - Food Factor season - YouTube

NYC Qualifiers Begin: Volunteers Needed

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