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Toys Puzzle Games (Games) Robotics Science

LEGO Junior Robotics Competition This Weekend 73

Posted by Zonk 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."
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LEGO Junior Robotics Competition This Weekend More

LEGO Junior Robotics Competition This Weekend

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  • Space Police. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Construct X ( 582731 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @02:28PM (#12324222)
    Though I do like the basic blocks, my favorite set was the Space Police as a kid. How about you guys?
    • yeah, I had a bunch of the space lego kits. I think I learned more playing with the technic kits though. Gears, motors, and pneumatics were pretty fun. Kids today are spoiled with these robotic control kits. Wish they had those when I was a kid.

    • Re:Space Police. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @02:34PM (#12324263)
      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.
      • The reason the do these XYZ things now is because sales were going down, you got it backward.

        I loved the generic blocks when i was i kid but it does not seems to interest most of the kids nowdays.

        Their imagination is overloaded by constant publicity for XYZ on TV.

      • Re:Space Police. (Score:4, Informative)

        by Blondie-Wan ( 559212 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @02:45PM (#12324318) Homepage
        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.

      • Re:Space Police. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by svara ( 467664 )
        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 el
        • That pretty much describes what I did with 'em. I felt the special sets were there so you could get the good pieces (Like the lightsabers in the Star Wars sets, and the hats and scimitars in the Pirates sets) and use them to make your own stuff. I never really liked LEGOs when they started doing the Aliens (not the movie, although that would have rocked), Fright Knights, and the Underwater Alpha Team Whatever type sets. Castle and Pirates. Aaah... The memories.
    • The blocks you could construct dinosaurs that moved and grasped is the set of blocks I liked most, next to construx.

      I think Lego went too decorative with their highly specialized pieces. Instead of going specific, they should have went general... Pieces with dots on the side, so you could link pieces out on angles. You got your basic 4 directions: Up, down, left, right, but you could even throw in diagonals with extra pieces.

      I just said,"Forget Lego", when they made all those fancy specialized pieces.

      • Re:Robotix (Score:3, Informative)

        by FidelCatsro ( 861135 )
        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)
        • Dude you do know that those exist dont you ;).

          Actually this is the first I heard of them. I never saw multisided Legos on the shelf. Instead on selling mass amounts of blocks, they sell small kits of specialized pieces. You even commented on the problem of running out of blocks. Now going silly: If Lego focused on producing blocks for the cheapest price, they could be selling house construction material today :)
    • I just got my missus a lego car kit (long story involving flat packs and left over pieces...) and the dude in it looks like he came right out of a Village People video.

      Lego men used to be generic and none distinct, this guy had side burns and a tash!
    • I had a bunch of the castle sets. I always liked the space ones, but the castles REALLY caught my imagination. My favorite was the "black monarch's castle" you could swing the back two quarters open to make it like the front wall of one huge castle. It had a ton of good spots for guys to shoot imaginary arrows at imaginary attackers (cause I never got my hands on the white castle).

      aww crap... thanks a lot guys I am gonna have to get out my collection now.

      When I was a senior in high school the pahantom
    • While I currently love Technic sets for being complex and all, nothing could beat M-Tron/Blacktron sets when I was younger. Ah... good times.
    • Though I do like the basic blocks, my favorite set was the Space Police as a kid. How about you guys?

      I really enjoyed the Space Police sets (they were quite reconfigurable), however I think the Blacktron had quite an appeal to them - they were the "bad" guys. Lots of glowing neon green plastic, hard to beat that!

      They even inspired my friend to create an epic Lego space model/fan fiction website [blacktron.net] which has some interesting models and reading :)

      The M-Trons were also super cool... Legos + Magnets = Ref

  • 9-14 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @02:29PM (#12324239)
    While this is too young for most of us to participate in

    9 to 14 years old? I think many here are eligible...
  • Lego League isn't the only competition in Atlanta right now, you know.

  • Segway (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Staplerh ( 806722 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @02:33PM (#12324255) Homepage
    I thought this was kind of neat. From the CNN article:

    The LEGO competition is the brainchild of Dean Kaman, inventor of the Segway scooter. It's part of his FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Championship -- a global robotics competition for middle school and high school students.

    Good on him, I haven't heard much of him since his vaunted Segway scooter. That being said, I think that it'll help more people 'think outside of the box'. Imagine if you had started doing this sort of thing between the ages of 9 - 14; you'd either burn out and be sick of it, or you'd continue to build on your knowledge until your in university and can really compete/innovate!
    • Never burn out. If you imagination is limited to robots and castles, LEGO would plain suck.

      I used to build semi-automatic machine guns that can reload clips. Or shotguns with the lock and load feature. Sniper scopes too. Of course, I could never make them shoot.

    • Vex Robotics (Score:3, Interesting)

      by kherr ( 602366 )
      Dean Kaman is doing more things. He just launched his Vex Robotics [vexrobotics.com]. This is the robotics kit that is a step up from LEGO Mindstorms. Essentially based on Dean Kaman's FIRST competition, this is a commercialized manufactured robotics kit.

      I've just about finished assembling my first robot with the kit, and the kit is what I've been waiting for since I could solder stuff together (no soldering required). It's real metal parts and real radio control and soon real programming. Radio Shack is the exclusive outle

  • I Legos (Score:2, Funny)

    by CSMastermind ( 847625 )
    The competition is intersting but isn't really anything new we have things like that up in Pittsburgh...

    I want to see somebody make a 5 foot tall set of legos, to scale out of normal legos oo... Ahh I love recurrsion

    • I Legos-Three Laws of Legos (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Virtual LEGO [amazon.com]

      "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."

  • Not robotic, +1 offtopic but still impressive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EtherAlchemist ( 789180 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @02:41PM (#12324308)

    Lego church from hell [amyhughes.org]

    Not quite my style, but damn- this is pretty cool. Not to mention friggin' huuuuge.

  • What We Really Need Is A Lego Robot That ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by rewinn ( 647614 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @02:47PM (#12324330) Homepage

    ... builds other Lego Robots, subject to radio'd requests.

    Then we can just ship it to Mars with a big pile of Legos. The Mars Lego Builder would build a Mars Explorer according to blueprints fromt Earth, and send it off to look around. When an unexpected event trashes the Lego Explorer, the Mars Lego Builder constructs another Explorer that allows for the event. Repeat until done.

  • 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?
  • ...welcome our new LEGO overlords.
  • I participate in First Lego League every year and it is really fun. You and your team builds a robot, programs it in "MindCode" or "RoboLab" and runs it against various challenges. If you are luck enough to live in a state that does A "Division 3" highschool special tournament, you can program in any language you like. It's fun

  • Grown Ups Can and Should play too (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gypsy2012 ( 644480 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMgypsy2012.com> on Saturday April 23, 2005 @04:45PM (#12324973) Homepage
    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 [hightechkids.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
  • Lego is having the worst year ever and have to lay of a huge bunch of workers.

    Seems the kids are more interested in computers than lego. And it seems the only way for lego to possibly survive is implementing these thing more effecient than earlier.
  • I was at the UK equivalent of this a few months back, definetely a great event to attend, and some really bright kids there who know their stuff.

    I think they should do a scientific study to prove that kids who play with lego when they are young grow up able to apply knowledge better than kids who, say, play with Action Man all day. Lego is great stimulation for the mind. Just a theory.

  • hey all (Score:1)

    by XO ( 250276 )
    The entire FIRST competition was this weekend, not just the LEGO part.

    I used to think Slashdot had a clue, but now everyone here just pisses me off. :(

  • Botball is much more challenging... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pongo000 ( 97357 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @08:08PM (#12326086)
    The CNN article implies that this competition was "invented" by Kaman...Botball [botball.org] 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 [handyboard.com] controller). Plus, Botball is open to high-school students as well as middle school.
    • The FIRST Lego League competition was actually the smaller of the two FIRST competitions that occured today. The larger is the FIRST Robotics Competition's championship.

      FIRST Robotics was started in 1992 by Dean Kamen and involved 28 teams in a New Hampshire high school gym. Today there's nearly 1000 teams in 30 regionals and a championship event. It is a competition for high school students.

      Early in January FIRST releases the rules for the new game and the kit of parts to all of the teams. Then teams o

  • FLL (Score:1)

    by Fr3d ( 787062 )
    These First Lego leaguge compititions arn't new, they've been going on for the past 3 years. I'm currently 16 but I was just young enough to participate in the compition for the first two years.

    The league website is http://www.firstlegoleague.org/ [firstlegoleague.org]

    For those of you that are interested in how the compition works. Each team competes for a maximum amount of points achieved by completeing various missions in an enclosed arena withen a set amount of time. Teams build and program Lego Mindstorms robots to get
  • Judging from the posts, I'd say most /.-ers don't really have a clue of what it takes to build a robot from LEGO or any other materials. What the teams of FIRST and every other autonomous robotics competition accomplish is a great deal more than you would expect.

    First there is the physical construction, some projects being as complex in nature as many real world projects.

    Second there is the programming, and while there may be discussion about whether LEGO uses 'real' programming techniques, it IS programm
  • 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 kid
  • Lots of good robopr0n, though only of Vex, no Lego or other FIRST robots:
    http://www.vexlabs.com/vex-robot-photos.shtml [vexlabs.com]

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