Many teams and coaches who are new to LEGO buildingstruggle with building concepts. A few basic principles and some experimentation can really help. Here are some resources you my find helpfului
1. Building LEGO Robots for FIRST LEGO League (PDF) [1]
- Produced by the Minnesota FLL
- A classis resource for FLL teams
- Slightly dated
- Covers way more than is needed for JFLL, but it starts with the basics.
- Section 1 and Section 2 are recommended for JFLL Coaches/Mentors
- Just click the link above to download
2. Engineering with LEGO Bricks and Robolab [2]
- Available from LEGO Education (click link)
- Overkill for JFLL, but again the building basics are well covered
- This book will take you all the way to advanced LEGO robotics and programming. Great stuff if you aspire to working with kids on FLL as they get older
3. The 9632 base lego kit (comes with the JFLL kit) has 12 step by step projects. You could have the kids build one or more of these. We recommend that you build one or two at home first so you know approximately how long it takes to build them.
Links:
[1] http://www.ortop.org/Files/LegoMentrManual.pdf
[2] http://www.legoeducation.com/store/detail.aspx?KeyWords=robolab engineering&by=20&ID=1436