Since the school year began, I’ve been teaching Lego Robotics two morning’s a week at Isaac’s new school, the Academy for Science and Design Chartered Public School, in Merrimack New Hampshire.
Many of you know I’ve been teaching Lego Robotics twice a week at the Academy for Science and Design, in Merrimack, N.H. As a function of the class, we had two teams competing in the FIRST LEGO League branch of the FIRST Robotics program, founded by Dean Kaman. (See http://www.usfirst.org/community/fll/ .) The ASD is a chartered public school, now in its second year of operation.
At the “MindStorms Madness” qualifying tournament in Merrimack, N.H., on Saturday, the two teams from the ASD came away with three trophies:
The team I officially coach, Robotic Revolution, won first place in the Technical category (Robot design and programming), and will go on to compete at the state competition on December 6 at Nashua South High School.
The other team I taught (but did not officially coach) won 2nd place in Technical, and got the top score during the seeding matches. (Sadly, they were eliminated in the finals.)
The photos from the slide show above are available here on PicasaWeb.
I’ll update this post with more details about the team and the event sometime in the next day or two.
Way to go guys!!
Are you allowed to use “Lock-Blocks?” They’re a LOT less money and you can get a HUGE set of them at Toys-R-Us for a lot less money than Legos. 😉
Mark has been obsessed lately with a set of “War of the Planets” (not to be confused with the “Battle of the Planets“) construction block set (not to be confused with Lego) made by “Best-Lock,” which sells very discounted nonLego bricks, and has produced the absolutely worst commercial Web site I’ve seen in years.
So, the reality is, the official rules state clearly that that nonLego parts are not allowed in the FIRST LEGO League competitions.
But, even if they were allowed by the competition, I definitely wouldn’t use them. (In fact, I found 4 or 5 Mega Blok pieces in the school’s collection, which I allowed Isaac to set fire to.)
We also use Mega Blok as an insult in our groups, which is far more severe than calling someone a Duplo. I think, though, I’m going to have to add Best Lock to our list.