Let them build battle bots
Yesterday, Jerry took Micah to The Mall for a while. When I met up with them later, I got an earful from Micah about the Battle Bots he saw in action in the rotunda. Jerry informed me that he had difficulty tearing Micah away from the action. I had read about the competition the previous day in the Strib and noted it because of its connection to my current project: grading student papers on potential interventions for juvenile delinquency. The article titled, "Battle 'bots: A guidance program for juveniles," describes how a local Alternative Learning Center offers a class in Battle Bot craft as a means of keeping young men involved in hands-on learning rather than crime. "Their 15-pound wedge-shaped battle robot is keeping guys such as 16-year-old Kiefer Morgan engaged in learning rather than going over the edge of juvenile delinquency."
That's quite a claim for a hunk of metal on wheels. This kind of idea seems to be a salient one for many, however, as my students' papers illustrate. Quite a few are proposing programs to keep kids engaged in leisure and other "pro-social" activities within and outside of school as a means to prevent and/or remedy delinquency. For the most part, though, these types of programs haven't shown statistically significant results in doing either.
But there is one indisputable fact: the Bots kick butt, as the video below illustrates. Anybody else remember this show?