LEGO Junior Robotics Competition This Weekend

Neuropol writes "CNN tells us our favorite locking building block company, LEGO, is hosting a Junior Robotics Competition in Atlanta, GA this weekend. The event expects to pit hundreds of grade schoolers ages 9-14 against each other in a 9 task Olympic Style face-off with each teams robot. Twelve year old Taylor offers 'NASA works with a lot of robots and when you build a robot you need to know what goes in it,' says Taylor. 'And when you're working with FIRST LEGO you have to figure that out -- how to set stuff where it needs to go.' While this is too young for most of us to participate in, it's great to see the attention being focused on such a potentially great generation of robotics developers."

Comments

Re:Space Police.

[Blondie-Wan]

They do actually make generic bricks and parts in abundance. The licensed sets actually don't use all that many special pieces unique to the licenses, just enough to tie them in. This is as one would expect - it's fairly costly for LEGO to create new pieces for sets, and when they do they try to get as much mileage out of them as possible, which means not doing huge numbers of new parts that are specific to licenses like Star Wars and Harry Potter that they won't be able to use for more than a few years (since the licenses will expire - they won't be doing those sets forever).

LEGO was already declining in popularity when they started doing licenses, and there's plenty of reason to think they've gotten a shot in the arm from them. I do understand the purist view that they shouldn't ever have done licenses to begin with, since LEGO's its own thing that really doesn't need gimmickry to be an excellent toy, but I don't think the licenses have hurt it as much as one might have expected, either.

I Legos-Three Laws of Legos

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtual LEGO

"Virtual LEGO introduces the reader to a suite of software that allows users to create and document computer-generated LEGO models. Written by maintainers of LDraw.org (the official hub of LEGO model-building software), the book includes coverage of popular freeware tools such as LDraw, MLCAD, L3P, L3PAO, LPub, POV-Ray, and MegaPOV. The CDROM contains all the software readers need to get started, all available LEGO parts models, and templates for building instruction layouts."

Never mind that - seen the Lego Star Wars Game?

[tyroneking]

See here http://www.lego.com/eng/starwars/videogame/default .asp?bhcp=1 for a link to a videogame advertised in my local shopping centre - what the hell is the world coming to?

Re:What about the main FIRST competition?

[civman2]

FIRST is an organization that also sponsors the FIRST Lego League. In FIRST, high school teams are given six weeks to build a robot designed to play that year's game, which is unveiled at the beginning of the six weeks. Teams must design, build, and program their robots to compete.

More info at: The official FIRST site and Wikipedia

Re:Robotix

[FidelCatsro]

Dude you do know that those exist dont you ;).
Well and if there is a direction you dont have then you can use a swing hatch type piece and make angles . .... Yes i do have far too much free time .
The creativity comes from using those special bits for other purposes .

Hell i just made a walking AT-ST with some mindstorms a couple of weaks back (i then changed it to the AT-AT as i was running short on legos)

Grown Ups Can and Should play too

[Gypsy2012]

While this is too young for most of us to participate in

NOT TRUE! I coached a FLL team this year, it was a blast!

You can be involved by doing that. Our team made it to the State Competition but not beyond that. These kids do this all over the world, and the one the article is talking about is the world competition that is the best of the best of the best.

It is very cool stuff, the kids learn so much and do so much. I had 3rd graders writing algorithms and learning about code reuse and project management. Not to mention quite a few physics concepts.

Check out High TechKids.org

What you should expect as a coach FLL Coach:

• Kids who want to learn
• Kids who want to compete
• a chance to mold young minds and create future evil genius' bent on world domination
• A chance to preemptively teach someone good coding habits before some idiot College Proff who can't code his way out of a paper bag teaches them bad ones
• Fun!
• Competition! (It is like a geek sport)

What you should not expect:

• That these kids know what they are getting into
• That they know near as much as you do
• To be able to build or design it for them (you can only coach them, you can't do it yourself)
• To breeze through without any effort

Actual Info About All The Events (Sorry, CNN)

[antispam_ben]

Reading TFA, you'd think ONLY the Lego competition was going on, but that's about 1/3 of it.

Quoting from TFCNNA:

"Joining some 25,000 high school students who compete separately, hundreds of budding mad scientists from ages 9 to 14 each hope their mechanical monsters will win an award."

The Lego League is obviously for ages 9 to 14, and the other two competitions (described below) are for the older high school students 'who compete separately.' Thus, the CNN article is all about the hundreds of younger kids, and only a bare mention of the thousands of older kids who make up to two-thirds of the competition (not to take anything away from the LEGO league).

Putting on my imaginary Reporter cap, the first thing I'll do is shamelessly steal text from the usfirst.org website:

"FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a multinational non-profit organization, that aspires to transform culture, making science, math, engineering, and technology as cool for kids as sports are today.

FIRST was founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway Human Transporter"

There are/were THREE things going on at this event:
The original FIRST Robotics http://www.usfirst.org/
These are given standard controllers and motors (much like R/C radios with high-power servos), and the kids have to find and make the frame, wheels, arms and other mechanical parts 'from scratch'.

FIRST LEGO League http://www.usfirst.org/jrobtcs/flego.htm
This is based on the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit(s)

Those two competitions have been going on for several years.
And this year for the first time:

FIRST Vex Robotics http://www.usfirst.org/Vex/

Vex Robotics is a kit sold at Radio Shack for $299 It's very much a complete kit with controllers, motors, wheels, frame pieces, nuts and bolts. Of course anyone can buy it but one of the requirements for the Vex teams is that they ONLY use parts from the Vex kit. IIRC, there were four Vex teams, and each team got two Vex kits to make their robot with.

Of course, the greatest shame is that I didn't go and have no excuses for not going. But at least I attend the local Robot Club meetings (and a shame there's no mention of this event on the website, especially since it's the FIRST HIT when googling for robot club):

(shameless plug)
http://botlanta.org/