In 2001, I was involved in a high school robotics program. The following accounts this great experience.

Motorola sponsors two teams to the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics competition. Our team name is "Team 112" (www.team112.com). The team comprises Motorola engineers and students from John Hersey High School and Buffalo Grove High School. We will compete against other teams at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois at the Motorola Midwest Regional Competition and at the National Competition at Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida. There are quite a few competitions. However, we restrict ourselves to these two due to time and resource constraints.

The robots must be built in 6 weeks. There is a 130-pound weight limit. This includes the battery and control mechanism. There are also height restrictions. This year's game is quite complex so I won't explain it here.

The primary goal of our team is to give the students a good learning experience and show them how to apply classroom skills to real world engineering projects. This year, we have a total of 39 students. The students are broken into a number of teams which concentrate in specific areas such as drive systems, software, arm movement, etc.

My primary role is on the software side. We use a micro-controller called Basic Stamp made by Parallax Inc (http://www.parallaxinc.com). We use the Parallax BASIC (PBASIC) programming language to write the software for the robot. Once the program is written on a desktop computer, it can be transferred to non-volatile memory, which is read from and written to by an interpreter chip. This interpreter chip fetches the instructions one at a time and performs the appropriate operation on the I/O pins or internal structures within the interpreter. One can create surprisingly versatile programs in this constrained environment.

The software team needs to closely collaborate with all the other teams. As the schedule is very tight, development on all subsystems is performed in parallel. Even though, the goal is to lock down the design in week 1, changes are inevitable. As such, the software team must keep abreast of design changes in all other groups. This year, we are making a web site to aid in team collaboration.

This year's competition is quite unique. It seems that the people who came up with it are big fans of the TV show "Survivor". Each match involves an alliance between 4 teams. Thus, there is no rivalry during the match. The competition occurs off the field. To make things interesting, the alliance partners are announced just prior to the match.

Another interesting thing this year is the rampant use of multipliers. You would think the focus would be on the big colorful and black balls. Well, it seems like the balls are red herrings. Teams get a x4 multiplier if they can get the two 8 foot cylindrical goals to balance on a semi-stable bridge in the center of the field. You get a x3 multiplier if you end the game in less than 30 seconds. However, 0 multiplied by 12 is still 0. That is where the surprising scoring rules come in. Small black balls a worth a point and big balls are worth 10. However, you can put only one big ball in a goal and you only have two goals! If a robot gets into the end zone, that is worth 10 points. There are also points for something called "the stretcher". Technically, you can realistically get 400 points without putting a single ball in the goal!

Strategy and Cooperation will be big parts of the game. One thing is for certain. This year's competition is going to be very interesting. Check out the FIRST web site (www.usfirst.org) for more information.