My friend, Suzala and her husband, Rick are big into First Robotics. They even wrangled me to help review the projects of the younger kids a few weeks ago. Yesterday and today is the First Robotics Long Island Competition at Hofstra University. I went yesterday to sketch the competition. There were about 50 teams from all over including Istanbul and Switzerland. Suzala and her husband had started the team in their school district and their daughter is the first student that will have been in the program through her entire elementary and high school career. Yay, Spike!!!
Each team builds a robot for the competition which involves the robot picking up the orange balls and putting them into the holes in the rocket shaped displays or the lower flat display. I didn't sketch the robots yesterday but they look sort of like something built from an erector set and a motor...not the cute little people robots. They also have to avoid the other robots that may be trying to knock their ball out of their "arms." They get points for other things too and form alliances with other teams on the field at the same time. There is a lot of computer data analysis to form helpful alliances with the other teams, and Spike (Suzala's daughter) does a lot of the data collecting and analysis. We were seated up in the stands not ground level and it is hard to see some of the details on the floor equipment. I was happy with my sketch and even got one of the team members with his team "Let's Go Pobots" sign. It was a lot of fun sketching this.
