Since 2002, K-12 curriculum standards in Thailand have continued to be modernized with a goal to include extra-curricular activities to encourage hands-on learning experience that can be related to real-life situations. One of the objectives is to enhance technology education

FIRST LEGO League (FLL) robotics program had been considered for Thailand in order to encourage teachers and students to develop programming and other non-technical skills with integrated subject areas in one program. In April 2009, Thailand signed an agreement to be one the latest FLL international partners with a planned national tournament to be held in Bangkok on December 12, 2009. The Champion’s Award winner will represent Thailand in FLL Open International Championship which will be held on May 6, 2010 in Taiwan. The organizer, Gammco (Thailand) Co., Ltd., anticipates having 20 FLL teams in 2009 as a pilot year and more than 50 teams for next year.

Upon learning of the first FLL tournament in Thailand, Livingston Robotics Club (LRC) started a collaborative project with FLL Thailand organizer in June 2009 to provide assistance in organizing the first FLL tournament in Thailand. With many new FLL teams that need to learn different aspects of FLL competition in a relatively short period of time, there is a need to provide teams with as much additional training resources as possible. With this collaboration, the 2009 1^st place US Open Champion’s Award team Landroids has agreed to offer the training materials that were used in the 2009 New Jersey FLL summer orientation sessions for the Thailand teams to use as a platform to jump start the team training. These training materials were compiled by the five Landroids members based on their experience and specialties, in a “Kids teaching Kids” format to prepare the new FLL teams for the competitions.

LRC member, Surasit Nithikasem, painstakingly translated over 300 slides of PowerPoint presentations from English to Thai; and edited them to overcome the language and cultural differences.  These training materials cover both technical and non-technical aspects of FLL competitions, which will be beneficial to the teams in Thailand (as well as all other new FLL teams), not only to get an overall picture of FLL, but also on how to excel in the competitions and to attain important life-skills from participating in FLL.

For more information, see Landroids’ FLL team training web page dedicated to the Thailand teams and also the official Thailand FLL site.