Lego Robotics

[aeolian]

This year my son is in a Lego Robotics team. They have a rookie team, which means that neither the coaches nor the kids have participated in Lego Robotics competition before. They have been working on it for the last 2-3 months.

Sunday was the regional competition. There were 20 teams with 8 rookie teams and 12 non-rookie team. 8 awards were given at the end of the competition, and my son's team won the rookie team award. Also, 3 teams are selected to move on to the state competition in just over a months, and his team is one of the ones picked. His whole team was just crazy excited that they won and got picked to move on.

aeolian

[warren0728]

very cool...congrats to your son...what did they build? any pics?

ww

[aeolian]

There are 3 elements to the competition. The first is the robotic challenge where the team has to build and program a robot to perform up to 9 challenges in 2 and a half minutes. The challenges are run on a pre-defined table and are things like make your robot scoop some object up and move it to a designated spot, or drive your robot to a certain spot then push a lever, etc. The second is to do a presentation on a topic, this year's topic is nanotechnology. They are questioned on their research. The third is the technical review where the team shows a panel of judges their robot and answer questions about the robot's design and the programming they did for it. The rules are quite strict. The judges can ask questions of any specific child and no other child can answer for him/her.

The robot is built out of a Lego set with a controller called NXT (see the link below for a description). The kids are supposed to build and program the robot themselves with guidance from coaches.

NXT :
http://mindstorms.lego.com/Overview/

A couple of pictures from the challenge. The first shows the table (actually there 2 tables side by side with competition going on simultaneously). One of the kids from the team has his hands on the robot. If you follow to the corner of the table you see a small yellow Lego truck and a red platform. This one challenge requires the robot to start from home (where it is in the picture) to go push the truck onto the platform, then push on a lever to lift the platform off the ground. The second pictures shows the team looking on as the judges add up their score from this round of the challenge. You can now see that the yellow truck is on the platform and up in the air.

[Tone2TheBone]

Hey that's pretty cool! Made it to state! If you can take some pics when the time comes so we can see.

[warren0728]

that is excellent....keep us posted on their progress!!

ww

[sunvalleylaw]

that is excellent....keep us posted on their progress!!

ww

Most Excellent!! Congrats! I love creative stuff.

[SixStringJoe]

Boy, that sounds great. As a kid robotics always facinated me.