ROBOlympics
A coworker of mine used to build and fight a bot on the television show BattleBots. She’s still at it (despite there no longer being a BattleBots show) and will be at the ROBOlympics in late March:
Were you an old BattleBots fan that really misses the show? Do you wish Robot Wars was still around? Have you got kids with lousy math/science grades that need a ‘boost’ to get them re-interested in their classes? You’re gonna LOVE ROBOlympics!
When Comedy Central cancelled BattleBots back in 2001, those of us who love combat robots went semi-underground. We still compete, and one of the biggest and best comps around is coming up in late March at San Francisco State University. This event not only features combat robots, but sumo robots, ribbon climbers, solar racers, RoboSapiens events, and LEGO Mindstorms events.
I will be competing with my new lightweight wedge “Uh Oh!” at this event. If you’ve only ever watched ‘bots on TV….well, geez. You gotta eat lunch with me and let me regale you with tales of gourmet damage. BattleBots can only give you a FRAGMENT of what it’s like to fight live. Meanwhile, you can watch footage from last year’s ROBOlympics here: http://www.chaosengineering.com/robovideos.html (Shiva is my heavyweight, formerly Phrizbee, currently undergoing plans for a rebuild. And yes, I lost my !@#W(%^ batteries after the last bounce off the I-beam.).
And the kids. Kids don’t get math or science (for the most part) unless it has a direct application to something incredibly cool that they want to work on. Your kids will LOVE this event, and all you have to do is pose some questions to them like, “If you know how many inches across Super Megabyte is, and how fast its Etek motor spins, can you tell me how fast the blades are when they hit Shovelhead?”. Suddenly math and science have immediate implications for them….
Check it out here: http://www.robolympics.net/
Link for advanced ticket sales at top of page.
No, I don’t make a cent off ticket sales….I’m just trying to keep our event running so I can get Shiva rebuilt and fight in the heavyweight division again!
I might have to go and check it out. Nothing like watching machines with a painstaking number of hours put into them beat the crap out of one another.
