High school students go robotic

Teams start annual technology competition Saturday in Laurel

Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2007

High school students in 34 teams in the Washington, D.C., region will huddle Saturday at Capitol College in Laurel to play a different kind of varsity sport: robot building.

The college will kick off the fifth annual Chesapeake regional robotics competition of FIRST — For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, a nonprofit educational organization.

Major companies such as FedEx Corp., General Electric Co., Boston Scientific Corp., Daimler-Chrysler Corp. and Delphi Corp. are national sponsors of FIRST, which was founded more than 16 years ago by Dean Kamen, the inventor of the standup, electric scooter Segway.

Capitol College will be among 47 regional sites where high school teams from the United States, Brazil, Canada and Israel are to receive their instructions and parts kits for building a functional robot within six week. Eligible entries may weigh no more than 120 pounds or stand more than 6 feet tall.

An estimated 1,310 teams with 32,500 members will receive the same instructions, or ‘‘the game plan,” said spokesman Bill Holleran. The event will be Webcast by NASA from FIRST headquarters in Manchester, N.H.

To make sure the local students get off to a strong start, four teams from the 2006 competition will put their robot entries through their paces, Holleran said. Those teams are from McKinley Technology High School in Washington, D.C.; Glenelg High School; Woodlawn High School in Baltimore; and Dulaney High School in Timonium.

The 2007 Chesapeake FIRST Regional Robotics Competition is sponsored by NASA, the Naval Academy in Annapolis, the Sylvan⁄Laureate Foundation in Baltimore and Crabtree Associates public relations in Falls Church, Va.

The competition is a ‘‘unique varsity sport” of the mind designed to help high school students discover how interesting and rewarding the life of engineers and researchers can be, Holleran said.

The Chesapeake competition — one of 37 regional contests in the four nations — will be held March 15–17 at the Naval Academy.

The championship competition will be held April 12-14 at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.