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I just returned from the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago where they
held the Illinois state FIRST Lego League Mindstorms competition. FIRST is an
organization that uses Lego Mindstorms to help prommote kids pursuing careers
in engineering (http://www.usfirst.org). They attended MIT Mindfest as well.
There were well over 50 teams participating, each created a robot that placed
ping pong balls in a bin and knocked a post to make a couple Lego astronauts
fall. I shot about 2 rolls of film on the robot competition and the teams of
kids with their robots, I'll post them when I get them developed.
I talked to the technology coordinator for FIRST at the event (pretty much one
of the guys in charge there) about promoting LDraw for use with their
contests. He sounded interested and will look into the program to see if they
can inform the teams about it and how it will work with Autodesk and TLG, who
sponsor them. If it works out, thousands of kids who work with Mindstorms
will be indroduced to LDraw as a way of documenting and sharing Lego model
ideas and introduced to the online Lego community as well.
Aside from that, John VanZwieten met me there with his family and we had fun
talking about Lego stuff and watching the competition.
I'm thinking about working with a FIRST team for the kids or joining a high
school level team - overall I was impressed with the compeition and the
organization! Next week there's one of these events for Ohio just south of
the Kentucky border, I don't have details on that event though. But
DEFINITELY worthwhile to attend.
-Tim Courtney
ldraw.org Project Coordinator
http://www.ldraw.org
http://www.zacktron.com
AIM: timcourtne
ICQ: 23951114
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: FIRST Lego Leage competition at MSI Chicago
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| FIRST appears to be an excellent program from what I've seen. I'd sure like to see the kids in action instead of just photos of their robot competitions. Parallax (the makers of the BASIC Stamp) have recently started providing support for FIRST. See (...) (25 years ago, 5-Dec-99, to lugnet.robotics)
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