FIRST Robotics Competition Starts Today

Posted by timothy on Saturday January 5, 2002 @03:43AM from the name-your-robot-after-a-pronoun dept.

cscx writes: "Today is the kickoff day of the 2002 FIRST Robotics Competition. For those of you that don't know what FIRST (Dean Kamen, Segway, IT) is, it's an organization meant to interest high-school students in science and engineering by giving them 6 weeks to build a complete functioning robot. (By the way, FIRST is what most likely inspired BattleBots) Teams, although they require funding to pay for the kits, receive many different mechanical and electrical (the programmable control system kicks ass! :) parts in the kits, along with full copies (donated by the companies) of Autodesk Inventor, Character Studio, 3D Studio Max, and Reactor, as well as Microsoft Office XP, Frontpage, and Project. There is a live webcast of the kickoff, with an unveiling of the game at 11:00 EST." Update: 01/05 16:15 GMT by T : Here's a link to the webcast information page; the webcast is available in WMF and RealMedia formats, and will be archived as RealMedia.

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There's a lego mindstorms league too by miradu2000 · 2002-01-05 04:14 · Score: 4, Interesting

I helped First test this out, but now it seems to have gone international. First Lego League International . It's pretty cool - here though the challanges are known before when building your robot, and you are giving a Lego Mindstorms kit and can use your own components. It's mainly for late elementry or jr.high school - but it can be mentered by anyone. It was a LOT of fun when I did it except the other team destroeyd our robot...