Considering Elijah’s complete fascination with Legos and robotics, we checked out the First Lego League robotics competition at the University of Texas at Dallas. The first thing we saw when we went in really cracked the kids up:
trophies made from Legos!
There weren’t any competitions going on when we first got there so we watched a group testing and tweaking their robot for their next match.
It was confusing at first but we were able to understand the basic jist of what the goals of the matches were after watching for a few minutes. The rules and goals of the matches are delineated clearly in this YouTube video.
Probably the most interesting part was talking with some UT Dallas robotics students on our way out. They showed and told us about a couple of the robots that they had been working on and their functions/special characteristics. One of them is The Blender- an acclaimed combat bot as seen on BattleBots.
This has started a combat robotics fixation in our house. Here, the boys build and battle their own robots in Robot Arena- a computer game in which the user can use computer-generated bots or tailor-make their own. It is very complicated and realistic in the sense that the size of motor, CO2 cartridges, etc. must be appropriate to power the size of the bot and the weapons that are chosen. The bots can then be matched against others online. Cool!
Check out the new home of Humans Being for show archives and updates on Sarah's endeavors.
That looks like it was so cool!