title: How could Agile methodologies be used with a middle school Lego Robotics team?
body: <p>I'm a coach of a middle school Lego Robotics team, competing in our local FIRST Lego League competition. I'm interested in bringing Agile methodologies to our team. From what I've been seeing, it seems like a good fit, and would really help teach the students how things work in real world software engineering. The problem is that I'm a bit shaky on some aspects of adapting Agile to a software+hardware problem.</p>
  
  <p>Here's what I have so far:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>In the competition, the robot is set up on a table with many Lego structures. These make up missions worth varying number of points. The robot leaves a Base area, does something (ideally one or more missions) and returns. This sounds a lot like a "user story", and I'm already planning to get the students to write what they want the robot to do that way. All the missions basically become the backlog!</li>
  <li>I'm also going to use Planning Poker to estimate how hard they'll be to build and program for. Our team only meets for 1 hour per week, though. What would be the best way to set up the time estimates? I'm thinking that the smallest unit should be 1/2 an hour, and would go up from there.</li>
  <li>These missions tend to be pretty complex sometimes, and benefit from being broken down into simpler tasks. Should we worry about that when writing up user stories? (Doesn't seem so...)</li>
  <li>As coach, should I act as project owner? Or should a student on the team be tasked with determining which missions or combination of missions is most important?</li>
  <li>Given that our team is small (8 students), would one Scrum Master be best?</li>
  <li>Given that our team is small, is it fine for students to be testers and developers as needed? (I'd like to avoid giving them excuses for downtime.)</li>
  <li>Since we only meet 1 hour per week, would a sprint length of 1 month be best?</li>
  <li>I've also been looking at the concept of test-first design, and while it seems great, I don't understand the terminology. How would I get my students to design the robot and its programs test first? Would it even be appropriate?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I know these are a lot of questions. Any help you all could give me would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!</p>