Lego competitions

There are plenty national and international initiatives to let robot creations meet-up in competitions. The FIRST Lego League is on of the most prominent matches in this field. Just like RoboMind there are offered programs on different levels.

Students participate with a lot of enthusiasm in Lego competitions, but could exploit the possibilities of Lego MindStorms even better if, in a preliminary phase, they would be introduced to the basics of computer science and robotics.

With RoboMind an entire class can exercise with creating solutions for robot-tasks, because you only need computers. This is an advantage as often only few real robots are available which may not give everyone a chance to test their creations. Further simulation has the advantage that you can try much more than would ever be possible with a real robot

More importantly simulation allows to focus on the technical aspects of a program/solution first without disturbing and distracting random environmental conditions like a weak battery or slipping tires. In practice such random variations often induce students to use a trial-and-error strategy with very simple programs while nothing substantial is really learned from this.

We are currently developing a curriculum and workshop based on RoboMind to teach students the basics of programming first. With this knowledge we expect that they will be more effective and succesfull later on while engaging in real robot competitions.

With build-in LEGO integration, RoboMind allows you to export scripts directly to your LEGO Mindstorms NXT robot. In the documentation you can find out more about this feature.