Expert Involvement

Why Expert Involvement Matters

In FIRST LEGO League and the real world, teams don’t work alone. Connecting with experts is an important part of building a strong project. Experts help students understand real problems, ask better questions, and improve their ideas with real feedback.

By talking with professionals, teams refine their solutions, think critically, and create projects that are realistic and meaningful.

One of our cornerstones in solving our solution is be make it buildable and workable. The best way to know if it works is to get it in the hand of the people who are going to use it!

Barbara Tejada

Barbara Tejada is the Cultural Resources Program Manager for the Angeles District of California State Parks. In this role, Barbara oversees historic structures and landscapes, museum collections, archaeological resources, and collections, and acts as the district tribal liaison. We first met with her over zoom and later met her in person at The Chumash Indian Museum where we got to get her feedback, asked her various questions about excavation in archaeology and project enhancement, receiving valuable insights in return. She gave us insight to pivot from using water to using air as a means to clear debris away during digging

Patrick Hunt

Patrick Hunt is an alpine and montane archaeologist involved in documenting history through geoarchaeology as well as written texts. He specializes in provenance, dating and weathering as well as archaeoethnobotany and lichenometry and related sciences. Hunt received a National Geographic Society grant in 2007, which funded his Hannibal studies in the Alps, Italy, Spain, France, Tunisia, Turkey and around the Mediterranean. We met with Mr. Hunt over zoom after trying out A.I.R. , discussed archaeology , shared his experience experimenting with our tool, and suggested that we expand our tools by adding a brush attachment.

John Rick

John Rick’s research focuses on prehistoric archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers and initial hierarchical societies, stone tool analysis and digital methodologies, Latin America, Southwestern U.S. We sent Mr. Rick a kit to test out, he gave us some feedback on different ways to use our tool and suggested thinking about developing a way to remote start the pump. With his feedback we moved the starting switch to the handle on this prototype.

Christopher Witmore

Christopher Witmore the President’s Excellence in Research Professor of Archaeology and Classics in the Department of Classics & Modern Languages & Literatures at Texas Tech University. He is known for blending in-depth engagements alongside archaeological objects with longstanding and pressing questions of human and nonhuman existence. He has published 7 books and has written many journal articles and book chapters. We were able to send Mr. Witmore a kit which he was able to use in the field to give us real time feedback.  He found our tool incredibly useful for removing soil from delicate objects like buried fabrics in dry conditions.

Dale Wagler

An industrial design expert and Engineer for Yamaha Guitar Group reviewed our product designs and suggested switching from a belt loop to a clip design for attaching the air pump to the pants and also adding some velcro inside to help keep the pump in place.