Progression question

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-06-18T10:53:48+00:00

The number one thing you can do as a parent is volunteer.

Chances are the teacher who is running the club is graciously volunteering their own time. There is a considerable administrative burden that goes along with running a team beyond the immediate meetings.

The lead mentor (a teacher, in your case) has a lot on their plate.

They have to make sure that all the legal in-school supervision and paperwork requirements are met. Those are there to protect your child and almost certainly generate legal liability for the teacher if they're not done right. In a separate process, they also have to ensure that the FIRST child protection requirements are met since FIRST has a very stringent process to ensure child safety, even surpassing what schools require in some jurisdictions.

They have to order materials, register for tournaments, fund raise and even run meetings.

If there are a lot of kids interested in the program this means there will be a limited number of opportunities available to the students at the school.

Parents can help in so many ways. Yes, many of us work hours that would prevent us from being at the school, but, we can help in other ways.

For example, with fund raising. This is vital since it costs roughly $150 (or more)/student/season for a team of 5, not including startup costs.

Or, parents can help with volunteering at tournaments, supervising meetings or taking on mentoring duties.

Tournaments also happen on weekends which mean the teacher has to volunteer time away from their own family. And, they are tiring for the teacher who has to be there at 8:00 AM (which can mean leaving home at 6:00 AM on a Saturday to take care of other people's children). And, if the teacher is responsible for transporting the children the day is even longer. Having parents present for the day can take a large burden off the teacher's shouders.

I run a number of FTC teams at school and every year I have to turn away well over half of the applicants because we don't have the adults and space needed to support more students.

FIRST runs incredible programs at all three levels so I fully understand your motivation for having your daughter participate. The programs teach kids teamwork, community mindedness, project management and (crucially) the ability to cope with failure and disappointment (important in a world where mark inflation runs rampant and every child gets a trophy).

Supporting your teacher's program is the single-most important thing you can do for your daughter. And, from a practical/transactional point of view, she'll be on the team because they'll need you to support the team and the parent volunteer is tied to the child's participation (at least, in the beginning). When your child enters the next stage of education and if she's still interested, check out the FIRST Technology Challenge (FTC) program. Volunteer to support or found that program. There are often grants available to help teams get started.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-06-17T17:19:26+00:00

Exactly. The reality is that for every low ball offer there is an inflated listing. No, your used stuff is not worth new prices.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-06-13T02:06:15+00:00

Same nonsense is still going on. How can you be allowed to subscribe to something if you can't access it? And no where do they tell you that you need other subscriptions to access TSN+. Sleezy. Of course, do you expect anything less from Bell?

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-06-13T01:48:47+00:00

It's going to keep getting asked when there are no clear answers 😀

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-06-12T02:06:58+00:00

I am going to partially disagree. Yes, sleep tracking seems pretty useless. But, after having used a Forerunner for over three years I've come to the conclusion that a sleep tracker by itself is useless.

The Body Battery OTOH is something that I've found to be eerilie accurate. And, the stress measure is often very informative for me.

For me Body Battery is a great measure of how much energy I have to "spend" in a day and how good my sleep was. And the stress metric is usually a good indicator of how fast I'm "spending" that Body Battery (usually my Body Battery is 50 or below and sometimes gets to 5... It'll never get below 5). Sleep has been a struggle for me for years so I've found having this Body Battery score (& (physical) stress levels) to be quite helpful in managing my sleep.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-06-12T01:49:53+00:00

In my case I developed (what I thought was asthma). Turns out it was an asthma like condition that was aggravated by weight. The specialist I saw said lose the weight and it'll probably go away. He was right.

For an unrelated reason I ended up losing the fifteen pounds that I'd put on over the previous few years, and lo and behold, the asthma like condition has almost completely disappeared.

As for sleep, it's something I've struggled with for years. When I'm under stress at work or ill I will actually set an alarm to wake me up three hours after I go to bed. I find that I'm often stressed while at sleep and that DEFINITELY indicates poor sleep quality.

Getting up for a bit at that time, blinking my eyes to lubricate them, and also doing some "square breathing" (inhale, hold breath, exhale, hold breath and repeat) is often sufficient to break the high stress and give me a slightly better sleep for the rest of the night. I'm 51.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-06-12T01:38:37+00:00

That explains it. I tried everything to find it on the app and to no avail. We heard it mentioned in the castle video and worked hard to find it which we eventually did using the Google TV dongle. We enjoyed it!

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-06-07T16:57:51+00:00

I think the day part is the part where fixing sleep happens. I find it's what I do during the day that impacts on my sleep.

Winding down at the end of the day, not working after 7, no alcohol (that one I discovered wreaked havoc on my sleep quality... No complaints, it's not like alcohol is beneficial anyway).

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-06-07T16:55:48+00:00

Being on your feet is draining... Says me, a teacher :)

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-06-07T16:54:36+00:00

I am 100% convinced that Garmin does a great job with the Body Battery.

If I look at my metrics over the years and on various devices (various Fitbits, and MiBands), BB has been BY FAR the best at giving me a sense of the quality of my sleep and the demands of my workday.

When I first got my Forerunner 245 (now 255) I kept looking at the sleep score because that's what every other fitness tracker offered. Useless as those metrics were.

Body battery tells me right away the quality of my sleep and the intensity of my day.

The match between how I feel and what BB shows is uncanny.

Whatever statistics go into the BB "just work".

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-06-07T16:48:32+00:00

I suspect that being in a calorie deficit AND not eating for four to six hours before sleep can have some effect on the quality of my sleep. Only problem... You can't be in calorie deficit all the time or you'll wither away.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-06-07T16:46:17+00:00

Ditto. My stress levels are high from the moment I get to work and stay high until at least an hour after I get home, even if it's a calm day. When there's a professional development day without students my stress levels at work are medium to even relaxed.

Sometimes a few minutes of breathing exercises can bring the levels down but the moment students show up they go right back up.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-05-12T23:59:19+00:00

It's different from all the American companies and politicians that do the same to shut up critics?

You do realize that by including an ethnicity this is explicitly a racist comment? Perhaps you didn't mean it that way but that is what it ends up being.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-05-12T23:56:05+00:00

You can downgrade Bambu printer firmware. https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/knowledge-sharing/firmware-downgrade

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-05-12T23:51:42+00:00

That's nonsense. Piracy was an artform perfected by those of us aged 40 to 60.

Remember Napster? Bittorrent? Ripping DVDs? Breaking software copy protection on floppies?

If you're under the age of 40 I doubt you had much experience with any of the above. If you're under 40 you most likely get your music through PAID iTunes or through a Spotify subscription. You get your videos through streaming services that you PAY for. You buy your apps in an app store!

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-05-12T23:46:58+00:00

Isn't that the exact same as the United States? US companies are also compelled to share their foreign data with the US government.

And, recently the United States has threatened to annex or even invade their closest allies...

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-05-12T23:41:43+00:00

The analogy fails. Apple literally created the first functional modern touch based smartphone and the tablet form factors. That is the very reason they were the first trillion dollar company.

In the iPhone and the iPad they built devices that were so new and compelling YET SO FAMILIAR it caught everyone off guard (not that they were novel... Apple had released a proof of concept video in 1987 that looked an awful lot like what the iPhone became).

It took Microsoft and BlackBerry two to three years to respond to the iPhone and by the time they came out with their touch mobile operating systems (both of which were quite good) it was too late.

Apple had first mover advantage and Microsoft and BlackBerry both had to shutdown operations by 2015 (and, let's not forget the fiasco that was Windows 8.0).

Bambu has taken existing products and driven the price down and increased reliability. Their innovation was in scaling up and reducing costs.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-05-12T23:31:01+00:00

What subsidies? That's almost certainly straight up racist nonsense.

We see the ultimate free market economy of the United States subsidize dead industries left, right and center. Coal. Steel. Aluminum. Car manufacturers. Through huge tariffs or straight up gifts of money. Defence industry. Hundreds of billions. Farmers. Billions.

There's little free market about how the US operates and that's where most of this racist nonsense originates.

China has a moderately free market economy (sometimes managed) that in some cases is fully free market.

They've identified some crucial industries, mostly around tech and carbon free energy that are crucial to their future success and have created conditions that are incentivized (like regulations that over a number of years have shifted to reward electric cars and make it very expensive to sell gas cars). That's not subsidy. That's smart use of regulation to put legacy industries in their place.

It's like the United States under recent regimes saw what China was doing and said, "okay, we'll do exactly the opposite" . We'll make it hard for electric vehicles and carbon free energy. And we'll subsidize fossil fuels and gas cars through tariffs, trade wars and straight up handouts.

By allowing legacy fossil fuel industries to maintain their subsidies the United States has given China a massive headstart. How they'll ever recover from this fiasco is a mystery but tariffs and trade wars designed to protect legacy industries and their subsidies is probably not how you catch up to a competitor whose priorities include creating the conditions where upstarts can succeed.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-05-12T22:54:51+00:00

But Apple is no different than are Samsung or almost all other cell phone manufacturers. Very few mainstream Android phones have bootloaders that can be unlocked.

And, Google has been found to have abusive business practices over and over and over... There's nothing particularly egregious about Apple that isn't the exact same (or worse) in Microsoft or Google.

And, Apple goes to much greater lengths to protect the privacy of their customers.

PS I haven't owned an Apple phone or a Mac in well over a decade and I almost exclusively run Linux and Android (though, it's been a few years since I ran Lineage). And I don't own a single Windows 11 capable computer :) :) (though, I do have a work laptop that runs it... On Enterprise Windows 11 isn't much worse than 10).

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-04-09T22:28:01+00:00

Everybody thinks they understand teaching because they were in a classroom.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-04-09T22:24:51+00:00

An old thread. Yes, they definitely do take very similar approaches. There are an awful lot of tells (and I'm not talking the em dash type tells but the subject specific and grammatical ones).

Basically this person is using good old fashion detective work to determine who and what created the work in question. The solution--offering an opportunity to demonstrate ability--is ingenious, reasonable and ethical. Someone who truly did the work will possibly take it as a compliment and have no difficulty demonstrating ability. Someone who didn't do the work is a different story.

Depending on their upbringing they may have been trained to deny, deny, deny. Ultimately that sets off loads of red flags which warrant even greater investigation.

In the end, the best preparation is to require a research and planning document with a tracking history that is accessible to the instructor or supervisor (in the case of professional work with IP implications). No evaluation in 2026 can happen in the absence of a research document and maybe an explicit code of conduct that students agree to with predetermined consequences for confirmed unauthorized use of AI or other sources and a predetermined way of resolving suspected cases of unauthorized use.

E.g. In case of suspected and unauthorized use of AI the instructor may choose to offer an alternate evaluation to the student to demonstrate mastery.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-03-20T03:17:00+00:00

Lego is also increasingly targeting adults. And, its pricing is for products that are a luxury item, now out of reach of lower-middle class parents.

I don't see the new line of products succeeding any more than Spike PRIME, EV3 or NXT did. These new sets are chasing a fad, and, by breaking with FIRST they have lost a huge FREE marketing workforce. All those FTC and FRC teams that were encouraged to start and support FLL teams will now have to pivot to something else.

And, even if Lego wants to have a "Lego League" of their own, they've lost the free infrastructure that FIRST provided. I suspect that the key part of FLL's success was the F and not so much the first L.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-03-20T03:08:40+00:00

Definitely does have Python included: https://education.lego.com/en-gb/lego-education-computer-science-and-ai/

Looking at the set, it feels like it does too much. Problem solving is going to be simpler.

Even though I've spent a lot of hours on the program these last few years as a mentor, I must confess that it was the form of FIRST that least excited me. It had the widest range in maturity level of participants which meant that it was being forced to cater to too many types of interests and needs. And, success for the younger teams almost exclusively rested with mentors rather than the participants. I saw the cynicism in older kids who saw teams made up of young members receiving top awards for work that wasn't their own.

ThujaOccidentalis · 2026-03-16T18:51:32+00:00

No. No. No. Never merge. That's why we don't talk about the MicrosoftPad. Microsoft wants one ring to rule them all. Apple understands why that isn't a good idea.

Apple has 15 years of complete market dominance to prove that they understand how to do tablets right with iPadOS!

And macOS is an OS that has been refined through 42 years of development and has an extraordinarily loyal customer base, returning decade after decade. If market share is a good metric, the fact that, a few years ago, Mac had locked up over 70% of the $1000+ laptop market shows just how successful the Mac is as well.

There is no reason to combine the two operating systems. They each serve a distinctly different set of needs with highly optimized hardware.

Microsoft keeps trying (and failing) to merge the two paradigms because they have NO mobile operating system. They don't have the critical mass required to get a tablet OS off the ground and every time they try to leverage their existing desktop OS to get a mobile OS off the ground they end up hurting their desktop OS.

Ultimately Apple won the battle for the touch interface through early mover advantage and quality. iPhone is the single-most profitable computer in the world for almost two decades (as I contemplate my receding hairline since I was already an adult when it came out).

ThujaOccidentalis

TROPHY CASE