Slashdot Mirror
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."
It was the Lego Technics for me, with the (no defunct I think) pneumatic pistons.
As a side note, I really REALLY hate those XYZ-branded Lego sets: the whole point of Lego bricks is that you invent your own stuff. With thos dedicated sets (Star Wars, Jurassic Park and whatnot), the child's imagination is locked in. I reckon that's a major reason why Lego have become much less popular these days. They really should stick to building generic bricks and parts.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Well, the way I and most kids I knew who played with LEGO did it was to build the branded thing according to the plan first, enjoy the nice and polished look of it... And shortly thereafter, break it down to salvage all the cool "special" parts from the theme and use those to built nice (and mostly colorful, hard to stick to one color when you mix themes;)) things with glowing antennas and such...:)
I guess that's the way it's meant to be done. The themed sets contain a lot of parts you won't get anywhere else.
The CNN article implies that this competition was "invented" by Kaman...Botball is a much more challenging competition, has been around for a number of years, enjoys NASA sponsorship, and makes use of multi-controller robots (including the incredibly versatile, open-source Handy Board controller). Plus, Botball is open to high-school students as well as middle school.