Over the weekend, I had a great experience. I got to be a Technical and Design judge at a FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Lego Regional Competition. It was awesome. Basically, 9-14 year olds from across the Upstate had to build Lego rebots to complete up to 9 different missions on a competition board. It was very interesting. The robot used a Lego computer unit, that you program using a program on your computer/laptop. The difficult part is that the Lego robot had to be programmed to complete the missions prior to the competition, it was not a remote control robot. But, they could touch or modify the robot inside of base. So it was interesting how kids designed the robot to have several different attachments that quickly interchanged so they could run a program on the robot and have it return to base, change out an attachment, and run a different program to complete other missions. You could store about 5 programs in the Lego computers memory.
So, basically the different teams came back to see me and the other Technical and Design judges and sat down and talked to them about their robot, their programs, design, and then they demonstrated on a competition board how it worked so we could judge locomotion, navigation, and predictability and accuracy of their programming. I don't think I've talked to that many 9-14 year olds since I was that age. In fact, since I was unpopular back then, I'm not sure that I talked to that many (about 200+ kids) 9-14 year olds ever. But one of the main reasons I don't like kids is because I never feel like I can talk to them at my level and since these were the best and brightest kids around, I could, so it wasn't that bad at all.
They competed against each other for points (different missions and the success level of the mission were worth different amounts of points), design and technical ability of robot, teamwork, and on their associated research project. My wife was a Teamwork judge.
By the way, the missions were tough. I could see it taking me 20-30 hours or maybe more to design and program a robot to complete all the missions.
It was a fun event and if you get a chance to volunteer, judge, or even attend one of the FIRST Lego events, I highly recommend it.
Click here for pictures of the event.
And here for more information about FIRST Lego and the missions.
So, basically the different teams came back to see me and the other Technical and Design judges and sat down and talked to them about their robot, their programs, design, and then they demonstrated on a competition board how it worked so we could judge locomotion, navigation, and predictability and accuracy of their programming. I don't think I've talked to that many 9-14 year olds since I was that age. In fact, since I was unpopular back then, I'm not sure that I talked to that many (about 200+ kids) 9-14 year olds ever. But one of the main reasons I don't like kids is because I never feel like I can talk to them at my level and since these were the best and brightest kids around, I could, so it wasn't that bad at all.
They competed against each other for points (different missions and the success level of the mission were worth different amounts of points), design and technical ability of robot, teamwork, and on their associated research project. My wife was a Teamwork judge.
By the way, the missions were tough. I could see it taking me 20-30 hours or maybe more to design and program a robot to complete all the missions.
It was a fun event and if you get a chance to volunteer, judge, or even attend one of the FIRST Lego events, I highly recommend it.
Click here for pictures of the event.
And here for more information about FIRST Lego and the missions.
