Another Season of FIRST LEGO League Begins
By Andrew Kerr
November 16, 2009
A 2006 study by the University of Leicester concluded that Denmark is the happiest country in the world. That may be due in part to LEGOs, those perennially popular building blocks that were invented by a Dane. But in addition to providing countless hours of amusement to children around the world, LEGOs have become something more. They are now inextricably associated with one of the world's biggest engineering competitions for kids: the FIRST LEGO League, which targets elementary- and middle school-aged aspiring engineers.
This year's LEGO league tournaments kicked off, fittingly enough, at about the same time as football season, and will culminate in mid-April 2010, when the FIRST Robotic Championships (think of it as an engineering Super Bowl) is held at the Georgia Dome. CEISMC Program Manager Jeff Rosen is the official regional contact for FIRST in Georgia.
The weeding process for those teams begins on December 5th and 12th, when 289 elementary and middle school teams compete in qualifying tournaments throughout Georgia. In each of three different competition levels 32 teams will advance, resulting in a total of 96 teams.
Those teams then do battle in the Super Regional Tournaments, where the top 16 teams from 3 sites (a total of 48 teams) will advance to the Georgia Championships on January 23. The Georgia Championships winner may be elligible to compete in the world championships in April at the Georgia Dome.
This will be the last year in the foreseeable future that the Georgia Dome will host the world championship event, so Georgia residents might want to take advantage of the opportunity to see what the best and brightest students can do with LEGOs (and also, at the high school level, what students can do with much larger machines that have a propensity for smashing violently into one another).
This year's LEGO challenge is "Smart Move." Students will be examining how to most efficiently transport people and goods through communities. How does a city improve its traffic flow? Through better traffic-light timing? Offering in-town shuttle service? These are the sorts of questions the students will be addressing.
A simplified description of the challenge itself is that students will guide LEGO robots through a sort of obstacle course, with extra points earned if the robots perform automated tasks (i.e., they perform certain tasks correctly without somebody "controlling them").
Hoping to level the playing field between the experienced and the neophyte, training for first-time coaches is being provided through the NASA/Georgia Tech ePDN partnership (electronic Professional Development Network). Says Jeff Rosen, "There is a marked increase in the success rates of first time teams with this sort of training vs. those that don't receive such training."