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FIRST Robotics Championship Underway
Bob Moretti writes "The annual FIRST robotics championship is underway at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. 295 of the best high school teams from North America and beyond have brought close to 20,000 students. 130 pound, 5 foot tall robots compete for pride and national recognition. NASA is providing a webcast. An explanation of the somewhat complicated rules can be found here. Any event that puts science and engineering in the spotlight for thousands of high school kids, many of them from low income or inner city areas, is a must-see. <shameless promotion> My team is currently in 20th place in the Galileo division. </shameless promotion>"
How about a link that works
130 pound, 5 foot tall robots compete for pride and national recognition.
The robots do what they do because some nice person has placed a wire up their ass, unless this is an advanced AI contest.
The robocup (real football/socer) people use 23cm diameter max robots. The american football people use 5 foot robots.
:o)
Bet the american football robots still insist on wearing body armour. Bunch of old women
Beep beep.
I think the Lego league sounds fun.
MINDSTORMS have become really hard to find. Do any retail outlets still carry them, or are we just left with the Lego website?
The most successful candidates, the most experienced candidates, are fundamentally driven by the simple, throbbing desire to eventually succeed in building a real girl (or at least an interim jerk-off-bot) a la Weird Science.
I for one welcome our teenage robot building overlords!
Er, wait....that would be truly frightening. Robot-building teenager overlords! Yeah, that's it.
Please help metamoderate.
Sure many of the teams are from 'inner city' schools but the competetiveness of team has nothing to do with the students and everything to do with corporate sponsorship.
I was at a low income rural high school and we competed in 1997. There was no qualification to go to nationals, just pay up the $3000 entry fee. We had a local construction company pay for the entry fee and the high school gave a few hundred for parts.
When we got to the tournament (we all paid our own travel and lodging) we found out the student built robots are an extreme exception. Most literally are built at the labs of GM or NASA or who ever is the sponsor, the engineers do everything, and the students have no clue. This is encouraged. A machine actually built by students in their school doesn't stand a chance
USFirst is a joke in terms of education, it's just a big PR opportunity.
Definately a cool program. I was involved in it 2 years ago, my team (643) won the Virginia regional and got 2nd in the Philadelphia regional. We also were in the championship tournament at Disney. For about all of January and Feburary (each year's challange is released near the turn of the year) the team worked on designing and building the robot and soliciting funds for hours each day. The championship was great, the school even gave us spending money and FIRST gave us vouchers for meals and tickets to the park. They even rented out Epcot for one night (and they took up half the parking lot for the whole week). Of course Dean Kamen was their with his Segway. It was certainly a great experiance and well worth it. Despite pressure from the school Administration and students, the tech. teachers didn't do it this year or last year, it was too much of a time commitment and they have families (I doubt their wives would have let them).
Sadly, there's a lot of truth to this.
I've been involved on the periphery of a not-so-local high school's (Rick Hansen Secondary School - Team 1241 "Force 6") development project and I'm disappointed in the extremely high cost of entry (ie to be registered and to get a kit), the sophistication of the projects as well as the other costs associated with it. It is essentially impossible to field a team for less than $35k CAN ($25k+ USD) to be successful. This includes money for the kits as well as travel expenses and, amazingly enough, promotional materials that are needed to ask for sponsorship funds.
The high cost of entry really bars schools from low-income inner city neighborhoods, which are the ones that would probably benefit the most from the experience. These schools also do not have contacts/parents in industry that could help as mentors and sponsors. This is probably the biggest issue I have with USFIRST right now.
The robot task is such that high school kids cannot work through them without substantial help from experienced engineers and what the kinds get out of the program (as well as put into it) depends primarily on how the sponsor engineers allow the kids to do. The best sponsors are high level advisors and make sure the kids plan out the designs themselves and help them think through the problems that they encounter rather than do the design themselves. I'm sure there are a lot of cases where the kids are barely able to play around with the robots before the competition because of the amount of time the sponsors put into the robots.
There is too much emphasis on the necessary fund raising. The Rick Hansen team had created a promotional DVD along with glossy brochures; there is an irony that these materials can be produced quite cheaply because they give the impression that the team has more money than they know what to do with.
Rather than limiting the kids to the materials supplied in the (incredibly expensive) kits, I would prefer seeing something where the bare minimum was provided by FIRST and the majority of parts were to be found at Home Depot/Digikey by the kids themselves. I think this would limit the price somewhat, would allow the kids to spend more time on design, building and experimenting (which is what FIRST should be all about anyway).
There should also be a restriction on how much the sponsors can do - clearly there are a lot of teams that benefit from corporate tool rooms with trained tool makers and do not rely on industrial arts rooms with the students learning how to machine parts on their own. To help enforce this, I believe that each team, to qualify must provide documentation on the robot to prove that the students were primarily responsible for the design and this documentation could be made available by USFIRST as guides for later teams.
Regardless of the warts, USFIRST is the best opportunity kids have to learn, design and compete with others. The events are amazing, fun and energetic experiences that are barely controlled chaos. The kids have a lot of fun, FIRST is a great way to build school spirit and it gives a few kids an opportunity to see if engineering/computer science is the way they want to go in life.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
It is rather disturbing how many people are bashing the program. It is a good chance for students to learn about many things they otherwise wouldn't in high school. The students on the team I help mentor (1243 out of Swartz Creek, MI) did all the pnuematics and all the electrical systems. We also have students learning how to program in C, doing all the autonomous code and writing code to handle inputs from the various controls. All the mentors did was explain to them how the systems worked, they hooked it up, they figured out problems, and they built the robot.
We are a rookie team this year, took first at the Grand Rapids regional, and are currently competing at the championship (17th place in the Curie division, currently). Sadly, I am not there.