Blue still plays with Legos (or more often, their big brother K'nex). Naturally, when an opportunity came to judge a Lego building competition came up, he had to do it, and he brought me along for the ride. So at an unearthly hour on a wet, slippery Saturday, we drove up to participate in one of the Utah FIRST Lego League qualifying events.
Kids age 9-14 form teams to build a Lego Mindstorm robot that they program to perform certain tasks on a tabletop course. They are allowed mentors and coaches, but the kids must do all the building and programming themselves. The theme this year was all about food and food safety.
Here's one of the teams presenting their robot design to the judges, and the tabletop course is shown in the foreground. Some of the tasks the robots performed were putting "groceries" on a table, collecting and moving good or bad "bacteria," transporting a truck back to base, and removing "rats" from the table.
The teams had two and a half minutes to successfully perform as many tasks as possible to accumulate points. Here's a couple teams in action.
Blue was a robot design judge and I got roped into being the photographer. We were asked to wear silly hats to help put the kids at ease.
It was a long day, but it was a lot of fun. I guess I better get used to these kinds of things, because I know Blue will get our children involved in activities like these. Perpetuating the scientific population, one kid at a time.
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