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LEGO Junior Robotics Competition This Weekend

Posted by Zonk on from the leggo-my-robot? dept.

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."

2 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Space Police. by Blondie-Wan · · Score: 3, Informative
    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.

  2. Grown Ups Can and Should play too by Gypsy2012 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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