Robot Lab! Now With More Robots!

This week I visited the incredibly awesome UTSA ITEC robot lab.  This is the kind of place that you dreamed of in elementary school if, like me, you thought that “science” should involve something other than “filmstrips.” They have a 3-D printer! There are LEGOs everywhere! And, as an extra bonus, the chairs look like they belong on the set of Star Trek.

Mary Stowers, the curriculum specialist, showed me the lab’s LEGO Mindstorm robot kits. The kits look like regular LEGOs, up to the point of the motors, the sensors, and especially the brain, a giant LEGO block that can be connected to a computer with a USB cable and programmed with a drag-and-drop interface. In the robot lab, kids are posed challenges, like to create a robot car that will go five feet and stop inside a masking-tape square. The challenges go all the way up to very sophisticated designs that can sense different colors, pick up objects, take over the world…

With the Mindstorms, kids can experience engineering challenges firsthand. On their own, they discover principles like symmetry and the structural soundness of different kinds of shapes. Mary says this can be especially important to kids from chaotic backgrounds, because the robots reward them for learning to think systematically.

I’ve got two kits for the library now. The kids are maintaining a certain level of sophistication about them, but the adults are squealing shamelessly with glee, probably because we suspect that the “brain” brick – which is, technically, a toy – is more powerful than the onboard computer in the Apollo spacecraft. Hold onto your hats! There’s science ahead!

Let Loose the Dogs of War (or Don’t)

We’re going with a medieval theme for Teen Summer Reading this year.  This is exciting already, even though I have barely done anything to prepare. It is exciting because I can ask trusted adults to volunteer to help the teens build a trebuchet and watch them either get extremely, extremely thrilled or (more often) blanch and look at me as if I am insane.

When Contemporary Fiction Isn’t

If I ever write a YA novel, it’s going to be a fantasy. I decided this because I’ve been weeding, and I’ve been struck yet again by the short shelf life of “contemporary” YA fiction. I personally think that The Mouse Rap by Walter Dean Myers is hilarious, but the cover of our copy has a picture of a kid with a flattop haircut and a Sony Walkman cassette player. No youth in our service area will pick this book up, except possibly to bring it to the desk and ask me what the kid on the cover has growing out of his ears and why his iPod is so enormous that it messes up the line of his t-shirt.

Nobody in fantasy novels mentions that they’re carrying a Prada bag or wearing 7 For All Mankind jeans. More to the point, they don’t mention breakdancing, record albums, soda fountains, or Reeboks. And all the clothes and hairstyles on fantasy covers look alike, no matter when the book was written. Wear and tear might make your fantasy cover look bad, but Farrah Fawcett hair won’t.

But this brings up another question. When does a contemporary novel become historical? Last year I recommended The Watsons Go To Birmingham, 1963 to a girl who liked historical fiction, shocking one of my colleagues for whom, unlike the patron and me, 1963 did not fit the standard definition of “historical” as “a time when I wasn’t alive.”

Little Women was contemporary YA fiction in its day. (By the way, Louisa May Alcott could be the patron saint of YA librarians. She once said she hoped her books had the dirtiest covers in the library because that meant kids enjoyed them.) Is Beverly Cleary’s Fifteen outdated contemporary fiction, or does it deserve a place on the shelf for its portrayal of teen-hood in the early 1950s? Only weeding YA librarians can decide.