HAMPTON, Va. – News media are invited to watch as tech-savvy students display their hard work with a robot demonstration at the New Horizons Regional Education Center in Hampton Thursday, Feb. 17.
Instead of watching TV or playing video games during their free time, the 53 members of the FIRST Robotics team — the NASA Knights – have spent nearly every day after school and on the weekends building and programming a robot to compete in the FIRST Robotics engineering game called LOGO Motion at a regional tournament in Georgia next month.
LOGO Motion involves building a robot and mini-bot that can move and climb as well as position inflatable tubes and symbols on pegs, making up the FIRST logo. The higher up an inflatable logo letter or tube is placed, the more points the team scores. At the end of the game, the main robot must deploy a mini-bot that will climb to the top of a nine-foot pole in under 10 seconds. The first mini-bot to the top gets the most points.
(See game animation here: http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/content.aspx?id=18762)
The NASA Knights are the second oldest team in Virginia and got started with the help of NASA’s Langley Research Center in 1997. The team has made it to the national competition every year since 1998. Since 1992 FIRST Robotics has encouraged high school students to use their engineering and psychological skills to tackle a robotic challenge that is presented in the form of a game. Media are invited to watch the NASA Knights demo their robot during an open house event from 5-7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 17, at New Horizons Regional Education Center at 520 Butler Farm Road in Hampton. Interested media should contact Amy Johnson at 757-864-7022 or 757-272-9859.
For more information about the NASA Knights, visit: www.team122.org
