"Could there be a 'Fan Favourite' robot?"

Ready for the nerdery???  YES.

So, there were two highlights to my past weekend.  One was dinner with S.  The other was a robotics competition.

Both of my brothers are smarty pants engineers.  In high school, they both got involved with a program called FIRST.  I'm not entirely sure what the organization does other than this robotics competition, and, frankly, I don't care to read about it on the site right now.  The robotics competition, however, is awesome.

This is for high schoolers.  Both of my brothers are way out of high school, but both are good people and have mentored teams in their areas since leaving high school.  Simon now works for an engineering corporation, which was founded by one of the guys who founded FIRST.  (I repeat, smarty pants.)  This year, Simon acted as an ambassador at the Boston Regionals, and he said I should swing by.

And I am thrilled that I did!

Each year, FIRST comes up with a new challenge (necessitating that each team makes a new robot every year.)  This year's challenge was called "Lunacy."  Check it out on YouTube for how it's played.  [Note: If anyone can advise how to imbed YouTube videos, that'd be great.  I'm clueless.]  In case you don't care to watch the video (fair enough,) here are the basics:

- Goal is to get "moon rocks" into your opponents' trailers.  You get two points per "moon rock."  (There are also special other balls, but they came into play so infrequently and I never understood them, so I'm going to skip them.)

- Preliminaries are played in some number of rounds.  Teams are randomly paired and randomly pitted against one another.  Teams get points for wins and ties.

- After the preliminaries, teams are seeded.  1-8 teams then pick two other teams (generally other great ones or ones that compliment their abilities) to form an "alliance."  ("Alliance"?!?!  It's like "Survivor"!)

- Finals are bracketed.  Single elimination, but best of three.  Alliances remain the same till the end.

I'm not an engineer.  However, it's so great to see high school kids come together and make these amazing, creative contraptions.  My favourite part of these competitions is always picking robots to root for.  My favourite this year was this one:

Its ability to bring the "moon rocks" to the top to dump out in the opponents' trailers was amazing to watch.  (Unfortunately, they only made it to the semi-finals.)  This sparked my desire to vote for a fan favourite...  (Too much reality television, you say?)

Other than the robots, there are lots of great things to enjoy at FIRST Regionals:

- The Blue Man Group played a little number.  (This may be Boston-specific.  Whatever.)

- The costumes:

A team was called the Ligers.  They purchased a lion costume and a tiger costume.  And switched heads.

There was a girl dressed as a pirate, carrying around a large wrench.  PIRATE WRENCH.  GET IT?

(Were you involved in some competition in high school?  Do you remember how INTO it you got?)

- Grown men doing the chicken dance...

- Stadium french fries.  Yum!