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BEST Robotics Competition Kicks Off Challenge 2004

Posted by timothy on from the move-some-bits-around dept.

His Eminence writes "The Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology (BEST) robotics competition has formally unveiled its 2004 challenge, dubbed 'BEST FEVER':'Alas, poor Squeaky has been feeling under the weather. Squeaky has a severe case of BEST FEVER. His system must be treated radically. Only gene therapy can cure him, his DNA must be repaired.' Teams have already started designing and building their 'unique' robot for this challenge."

7 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. what? by jpellino · · Score: 4, Informative
    "The idea for a BEST competition originated several years ago when two Texas Instruments engineers, Ted Mahler and Steve Marum, were serving as guides for Engineering Day at their company site in Sherman. Together with a group of high school students, they watched a video of freshmen building a robot in Woody Flowers' class at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The high school students were so interested that Ted and Steve said, "Why don't we do this?""

    Um, they've been living in a cave for ten years and never saw "FIRST" and just came up with "BEST"?

    --
    "Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
    1. Re:what? by rmohr02 · · Score: 2, Informative

      It appears "BEST" and "FIRST" have been around for roughly the same amount of time, but I hadn't heard of "BEST" until now either.

    2. Re:what? by LauraScudder · · Score: 2, Informative

      The biggest difference between FIRST and BEST (and the reason my high school did BEST instead of FIRST) is corporate sponsorship. Every team that we knew who did FIRST ended up not really designing their robots because their sponsors were so invested in having a winning robot that they had their engineers do most of the design work. BEST has no sponsorship - in fact, you're only allowed to use parts from a short list - and so the students end up actually doing the design work.

    3. Re:what? by Coolpup · · Score: 1, Informative

      I disagree. I led Team 292 PantherTech to 3 Regional wins and a division win at Nationals in 2003. I graduated from the same high school a year before and came back to lead the team. We didn't have a single engineer to help us. The whole robot design, strategy, and practices were designed and ran by students. Some of the bigger teams that have loads of money and tons of engineers with very complex robots were helpless to stop us. (Only a battery problem and another awesome robot (Team 25) was able to stop us from winning Nationals.)

    4. Re:what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      My highschool has been doing BEST almost since it started. The difference is that to participate in FIRST, you have to shell out huge amounts of dough. BEST is completely free.

  2. I was a mentor by Janitha · · Score: 2, Informative

    The BEST Robotics competetions are rather simple, yet it teaches many things. I did it for the four years in high school. Good stuff. I went to the Texas Brazos Competetions yesterday, which the team I was mentoring won 1st place.

    Check out their site at http://www.tiger-robotics.org/

    or the middle school's site http://csms-robotics.dyndns.org/

    I think their not bad for website coded by hand by high school and middle school students.

  3. Re:BEST Already Started This Year by potatosalad · · Score: 2, Informative
    Yeah, the title of this article is a little off, since the official kickoff was on September 11, 2004.

    This is my first year competing, and everyone at my high school seems to treat it as "practice" for the FIRST competition later this year.