Other than attending a charter school for part of 1st grade, I've been homeschooled my entire life up until entering the University of Minnesota. However, that's not to say I did everything at home. My sister and I (also homeschooled) attended co-ops to work with other students, took “field trips” with our parents, and we did have friends! I'm not completely sure why my parents decided to educate us this way, but from what they've told me it boiled down to what they thought would be a better education. A lot of my “schooling” came from experience doing things during the week when most kids were in school.
The single program that changed my life more than any other was F.I.R.S.T Lego League. I had always been interested in building things, which my parents noticed. They heard about a robotics competition with everything constructed using LEGOs. My dad, as a woodworker who liked building stuff just as I did, knew almost nothing about the programming and electronic components of the Lego League. However he decided to coach a Lego League Robotics team in our basement. After I invited several friends and talked my sister into it too, we had a team of six.
Our coach (my dad) initially registered our team as the Legomorons, sure that we would change it (we didn't). We began constructing our robot to compete in the upcoming tournament which was two months away. Progress felt slow at first, but we learned fast. Within a few weeks I was teaching the other members of my team how the robot's programming language worked. By tournament day, we had a working robot that could complete about 80% of the possible missions. The team had chosen me to operate the robot during the competition, so I felt quite stressed before the first robot performance round. The robot had problems during the round and ended up with a low score by our standards. It turned out that score led the tournament and we advanced to the State Tournament.
I continued to participate in F.I.R.S.T Lego League for three more years and went on to win 3d place at the International Tournament in Georgia. The planning, programming, fund raising, collaboration, and teamwork skills that I learned in Lego League will stay with me forever and are the main reason I'm studing Computer Engineering here at the U.
Sometimes I wish my parents would have pushed me harder, but then I realize that I've become what I have because of what I've done, not what they wanted me to be. So far my homeschool education's worked out for me!
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