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Matt Leese

I can't think of any audience better suited for plugging the FIRST competition to. It is a robotics competition that teams high schools with corporate sponsors. The teams build a robot in about 6 weeks from the time that they get the rules for the year's competition. My wife participated for two years and my own company sponsored a team for the first time last year. This could probably be called the Geek Olympics. It is intense and fun. If you get a chance to do it, grab on with both hands. And if you are on a first time team, find an older team that will mentor you. I know of at least one which has done exactly that.

Robot sports are making their way into the mainstream.

High school geeks can compete in FIRST robot competitions through a school club. The radio controlled robots which are programmed in modified BASIC are made to pick up balls and place them in their goal. The team with the most balls wins the match. The competition was aired on the NASA/Government channel.

Some sort of robot fighting event was on pay per view a few months ago too.

Parallax makes a pretty good microntroller called the Basic Stamp II that could be used. It does have a really annoying BASIC based language called PBASIC but it is still usable. It's a cross between BASIC and C with the more powerful features ripped away (these things have 32 bytes of RAM and 500 bytes of ROM if I remember correctly). I believe that Parallax does try to support the educational community.

If you really wanted to get involved in real time programming I'd recommend a program like FIRST Robotics although that is much more geared toward the engineering side of it. But the robot that's built does have to have a robot controller (it's based around the Basic Stamp II and sold by InnovationFIRST). There are a lot of interesting problems that creap up in that competition including the fact that there isn't any timing circuit. Another part of the FIRST Competition related to programming this year was that they released specs to a data stream that could be tapped into so I (and several other people independently) wrote interfaces to that information. And for those who can't tell, I am very much into this program still.

Matt Leese

FIRST is a project started by Dean Kamon (a super cool inventor.) Each year, teams of engineers, students and other interested parties get togethor for a intense six week period. They design, build, and test a robot. Last year they were 30" by 36" by 5'.

I was on a team last year, it was great fun.

If you want to find a team go to these discussion boards. They can point you to a close team.

FIRST is activly working to get kids interested in technology and needs all the help it can get.

Add Dean Kamon . We all know about the failings of our school system in technical education. He is a person who is doing something about it. I think he would be a great interview.

Nate Custer

I am also involved with the FIRST program at my high school, and things are starting to even out more. It all depends upon the coaches. Our coach makes an active effort to get more females involved and on the team. Unfortunately, there are very few who gravitate towards the technical aspects, most do "everything but the robot."
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kurdraw

As a member of the Palo Alto High School FIRST: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology team I can personaly attest to the fact that in the team the ratio of boys to girls is 5:1. We would be happy to have more famales on the team but they don't want to join.

The article claims that the BattleBots organization "is already the world's largest robot competition in terms [...] of the number of contestants."

There's a non-profit educational organization known as FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, which easily outnumbers BattleBots in terms of entrants. Last year, FIRST had 269 teams participating, and this year, the number of registered teams is greater than 350. I was unable to count more than 73 entrants for BattleBots.

BattleBots, however, targets an audience far broader, as FIRST is only attended by corporation-sponsored high schools. As others have noted, however, the strategy in BattleBots is mind-bogglingly limited, as the only objective is to flip the other guy over. With the FIRST competitions, a varying number of teams contend on the field to collect the most points, with the playing field and scoring methods changing each year... as well as the loopholes! ;-)

I hope to see more gutsy robot wars in the future- perhaps a fighter's circle where physical violence is allowed, given that the robot is designed and built to certain specs.

I've been waiting for the past few days now for something like this to come up. Too bad Rob or Jeff would probably never post it...
Some of you may or may not have heard of the FIRST Competition. It is a robotics competition which involves High School students, along with their corporate partners, Universities, or what have you. This year's competition was just released on Saturday. FIRST's Competition homepage is here. This competition is far superior to almost any other. There will be ten regional events this year, and the National Competition will be in EPCOT Center in Disneyworld, FL. There is no other robotics competition with such spirit or fire behind it as this one. Please check out the Homepage and support the FIRST cause in any way possible. The competition has grown from 28 teams in 1992 to over 380 teams this year. There are teams from all over the USA, Canada, and even a team from Brazil.
Some of you were wondering about mindstorms... They have a Mindstorms Competition called FIRST Lego League! Check it out here!
General Information on FIRST can be found at www.usfirst.org

I've been waiting for the past few days now for something like this to come up. Too bad Rob or Jeff would probably never post it...
Some of you may or may not have heard of the FIRST Competition. It is a robotics competition which involves High School students, along with their corporate partners, Universities, or what have you. This year's competition was just released on Saturday. FIRST's Competition homepage is here. This competition is far superior to almost any other. There will be ten regional events this year, and the National Competition will be in EPCOT Center in Disneyworld, FL. There is no other robotics competition with such spirit or fire behind it as this one. Please check out the Homepage and support the FIRST cause in any way possible. The competition has grown from 28 teams in 1992 to over 380 teams this year. There are teams from all over the USA, Canada, and even a team from Brazil.
Some of you were wondering about mindstorms... They have a Mindstorms Competition called FIRST Lego League! Check it out here!
General Information on FIRST can be found at www.usfirst.org

Go check out the FIRST robotics competitions. Creating a robot to destroy another is easy; creating one (in 7 weeks) to win a newly devised game every year is a challenge.

A US based high school robotics design competition already exists. The idea is to make engineering, math and science as popular as any physical sport. Students team with volunteer engineers from sponsor companies to build a robot designed for that years competition. National finals are held at Epcot Center in Orlando Florida. More info on the website USFirst.org

This reminds me a lot of a similar competion that I was in during high school. Check out the FIRST site for more info. It affected one friend of mine to the effect that she realized she was a geek and is going to major in EE starting this fall. :)

I did not intend to be anonymous but I haven't been mailed my password yet. I am the Übermonkey!