The Technic Alley

An interesting presentation – How FIRST Robotics can influence students and play a critical role in reshaping school education.

blip.tv video link

Over 140,000 children are participating in this year’s FIRST Lego League (FLL) tournament, comprising 14,725 teams from 56 countries. That’s almost a 14% growth over last year’s participation, as the chart on the FLL site shows.
Starting from the pilot tournament in 1998 in which 210 teams from 2 countries participated, FLL has grown steadily across [...]

First things first….
What is FIRST?
FIRST stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. Here are some quotes and pictures from the FIRST website.
FIRST is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profi t
organization devoted to helping young
people discover and develop a passion for
science, engineering, technology, and math.
Founded nearly 20 years ago by inventor
Dean Kamen, the 2008-2009 FIRST season
attracted over [...]

Here is an interesting creation using Mindstorms NXT, a Rolling-Orbital-Bluetooth-Operating-Thing (ROBOT) as its creator calls it.

Spherical Robot 02 (YouTube)
This project uses two NXT controllers: one inside the “thing” and an external one that acts as the remote control. The two controllers communicate via Bluetooth. The external controller is also uses NXT motors that are very [...]

This post contains a summary of all the posts related to FLL-2008 in this site.
FIRST Lego League 2008 Registration
FLL-2008: Climate Connections Missions
More FLL-2008 posts under development.

This year’s First Lego League robotic missions are focused on initiatives to explore and protect Earth’s climate. The official FLL website has the details. The following table lists all the missions, along with an analysis of tasks within each mission, the scoring rules, maximum points that can be scored, and other relevant information specific to [...]

New to Lego? Curious about gears, pulleys and stuff? The Lego Constructopedia has cool graphics that illustrate how you can use gears and pulleys to do various things.
Take this quiz and try to solve the problems before you click on the answers.
1. How do you make two pulleys connected by a belt to turn in [...]