Portland Teams in Oregon State Championship

15 teams were announced in the 2008 FIRST Lego League Season

Link is updated. Thanks to the anonymous person pointing out the problem.
http://www.ous.edu/news_and_information/news/ORTOP%20Portland%2020092.pdf

PPS students earn awards in Lego contest

Students from six PPS schools and programs were honored in a recent competition in which participants ages 9-14 build and program working Lego robots.

http://cms9.pps.k12.or.us/.docs/pg/12886

Perfect FLL and FTC performance

Perfect score in FLL - http://thenxtstep.blogspot.com/2009/02/climate-connections-perfect-run-400.html
Heroic performance in FTC - http://thenxtstep.blogspot.com/2009/02/ftc-delaware-regional-part-2.html

Lego Nanites Blogsite has been redesigned...

among other things, a section on FIRST Tech Challenge on the right...

Robot programming without a physical robot

I found RoboCode from a Saturday Academy catalog. Perhaps students find it more exciting to learn math and programming (in Java) by shooting each other's tanks.

http://testwiki.roborumble.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page

Can't wait for college? Free courses from MIT and Berkeley

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php

Their lists are impressive. Lecture notes, assigments, study materials are all there.

I checked out a source on mechanical engineering. It is pretty good too.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 launches in UK

Not a lot of details but color detection is mentioned.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/01/28/lego.mindstorms.nxt.2/

http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/21837/22861/lego-mindstorms-nxt-20-launches.phtml

It hasn't said if NXT 2.0 will be available in US.

If you find out more, please drop me a note, i.e., leave a comment here

FLL Season is Over for the Nanites

Well the season is over for the Nanites. The team had a go run in the state championship but the robot performance fell short. Despite the disappointment with the robot, the team did very well in teamwork and research and took first place in the research project.

We talked to Plastic Mini Figures' mentor, Kevin, and learned a lot from his insight into building reliable robots, in particular, the machanics of doing that. No wonder their robot is so robust!

The Nanites shared their robot and programming with dozens of teams visiting our table. We also learned a lot from other teams. The atmosphere was great.

Something for me to ponder - mixing 3rd and 7th graders turn out to be very tough for coaching. I will not do it again. Perhaps the 7th graders (going to be 8th graders in the fall) can move on to FTC while the little ones can stay on FLL. I don't know yet. But that is something to think about.

A Math Problem

Hi Nanites,

Thinking about sharpening your math skills? Try this:

http://mathcounts.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=355&srcid=1336

-Kingsum

Judging Rubrics...

FIRST has a new look.

http://www.firstlegoleague.org/community/uploadedFiles/FLL%20handbook%20web%20sz%2008.pdf

read pages 90-96, focus on the right most column.

For the 7th graders on the team, please reflect on what you think and share your thoughts when we meet today.

BTW, if you want to print them out, a high quality version is supposed to be available on http://www.firstlegoleague.org/community/uploadedFiles/FLL%2008%20cover+pages%20print%20quality.pdf - but it seems broken. So please stay with the first link I gave you for the time being.

-Kingsum