Yes, it's May. Yes, Wonder League started in October. Here's a post that explains our season, which really just ended in late March!

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love coaching robotics. I was able to coach middle school Lego League and high school FTC club teams at my previous job, and I was sad to give up that opportunity when moving to a K-4 school. Thankfully, Wonder League came along just when I needed it! ((Here's a shameless plug for my favorite HS robotics moment ever.))

Wonder League is a new(ish) league in it's 2nd season, with a 6-8 age division and a 9-12 age division. I decided to open this up as an after school club for our second graders, since third and fourth grades get to do our tech club. I expected about 20 kids to sign up and had 38 instead. Thankfully, Dustin Schneider and Kendra Hanzlik came to my rescue and helped me out with the club.

So, we split kids into 8 teams and set to work! We spent the first week learning how to code in the Wonder app.

Then, we learned about the missions. Here's the video introduction for the 5 missions that teams had to complete:

Our kids met after school for an hour every Tuesday night for 8 weeks and all 8 of our teams completed every mission! It was a huge accomplishment!

Here are the videos of each team and each mission:

During winter break, I found out that two of our teams had accomplished a perfect score! We were the only two teams from Iowa in the 6-8 age bracket to have a perfect score, which meant we were finalists in the world competition! So, those two teams met for 4 more weeks after school to accomplish the final mission. Both teams got their solution to work!

These kids worked so hard to come up with these solutions, and they also had to turn in a portfolio of their work and an introduction video that showed around our school. Many of our competitors in the final round were kids who are part of homeschool programs who have extra time to work on this and our kids accomplished everything in under 5 hours, total! We were all VERY excited to see those balls get in the cups!

Unfortunately, we didn't place in the top 5, but our kids had such a great time and learned a LOT and had tons of fun along the way!

Here's all of the kids with their certificates for completing all five missions!

Addy, Dane, Josie, Sam, Rylee

Willem, Aida, Jack, Kendall

And all of our finalists with our t-shirts that finally came in! There were over 5,000 teams that competed worldwide, and we were in the top 30 in our age range--that's top 1%! Again, I'm so proud of these kids! 

You can check out the winners of the competition here.