This weekend was the FIRST Technical Challenge (FTC) - the robotics contest for high school kids. This year's theme was called
Block Party, which means there were 120 little yellow blocks scattered across the playing field that the robots had to put into those plastic baskets. The trick was that the baskets were sitting on teeter-totter pendulums so when you put the blocks into a basket on the left side, it raised up the basket on the right side. While the robots looked very impressive most of the kids had absolutely no control over them, because they didn't spend much time practicing with their remote controllers before coming to the contest. Very few blocks actually made it into the baskets, but I had to pull a lot of robots away from the teeter-totters when they either got stuck underneath or on top of them.
