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Atlanta, GA — Shooting pictures of robots at the Georgia Dome.

VIDEOS MP4 / MPEG4 / AVI
Opening Ceremony
Team Introduction
Team Introduction 2
The Drivers Jump
Game Action (rear-view)
Team 341 Miss Daisy Scores
Team 341 Miss Daisy Scores Bigger
View From the Press Box
Robots Zoom Around The Field

Atlanta, GA — The FIRST Robotics championship is taking place at the Georgia Dome. Throughout the event, teams will be given the chance to win awards from a wide variety of categories. There are awards for enthusiasm and awards for ingenuity; however, perhaps… there should be a category that combines enthusiasm and ingenuity. When it comes to this type of achievement nothing shows how the kids use their heads better than the hats they wear. What about a medal for ‘off the top of my head engineering’? Or, maybe, the safest, funnest hat? You know, “You might poke someone’s eye out with that hat!”

Atlanta, GA — What happens when you gather geeks from around the world? Students interested in math and science gathered at the Georgia Dome for the FIRST robotics world championships. From Saudi Arabia to Israel and from Canada to Brazil, the youth traveled to Atlanta. There were over 500 high school teams from 22 countries. What happens when they get together? Well, they proved you do not need negative and positive to conduct electricity. The energy that flowed was 100% positive!

The children started the event with an opening ceremony “pep rally” hosted by some of the brightest adults that can be found. Woody Flowers, Dean Kamen, Bill Miller and executives from NASA, National Instruments and BAE Systems were among the dedicated adults in attendence.

“The US is in one of the biggest experiments in history,” said Woody Flowers. He is strategically obsessed with the economic situation. He believes the students are the most important element of a strategic plan to be rescued from the crisis. “We have a big, stubborn society to change.”

Co-operatition
Not only do the kids get serious hands-on experience with math and science, but they also get an advanced degree in business administration. The adults and students got into graduate level entrepreneurship and Intellectual Property (IP) rights.

The Chairman of the US Patent office announced that Dean Kamen received another patent. Unlike many of his previous patents that were for physical inventions, this patent was for business systems. The business system of co-operatition is how FIRST competitions are run — combining co-operation with competition. As well as receiving the patent, Mr. Kamen was also awarded trademarks for cooperation and gracious professionalism. In a display of gracious professionalism, Mr. Kamen assigned the patent and trademarks to the FIRST organization for $1 a piece.

Exploration
David Lavery, NASA Executive for Solar System Exploration, was awarded and recognized for his contributions as a volunteer. He announced NASA’s collaboration with Google.com on the ability to explore Mars in the same fashion as Google Earth. You can now use the technology to view every NASA image ever returned from Mars.

An astronaut from the upcoming space mission sent a video message declaring, “Let the games begin.” Yes, the robots would be singing “Georgia On My Mind”… if they only had one.

Stay tuned….

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