Bright and early on Sunday the 14th, 48 teams consisting of some 400+ middle-school
kids, along with a small army of adult and high-school aged volunteers, converged
on the Appleton-East High School
for Wisconsin’s
FIRST LEGO League state finals. Together with my son Jeff, and eager to
learn a bit about what the FIRST LEGO League is all about, I drove down to watch.
I wasn’t disappointed. It was an exciting, and extremely well-organized event.

At Appleton, I somewhat randomly chose
to tag along with a team from Middleton,
Wisconsin called The Blue Wizards as they went through three presentations
that are part of the judging process that comes ahead of the actual robotics
competition. I say "somewhat randomly," because I was intrigued by
the large, cardboard apparatus they were using to demonstrate their design for
a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) that would rove around on Mars, collect rock, water,
and soil samples, and then return to space. I just had to see what that was
all about.

FIRST LEGO League is an international
partnership between an organization known as FIRST
and the LEGO Company. FIRST, an acronym for
"For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology," is an
organization founded by the inventor of the Segway,
Dean Kamen, for the purpose of motivating young people to consider careers in
science, technology, and engineering. In the FIRST LEGO League, teams of young
people aged 9-14 use LEGO
Mindstorms as a vehicle for learning about robotics. Each year the kids
are given a set of robotics challenges, or problems to solve. Using a standardized
kit, they build and program robots to solve each problem. This year’s theme
was Mars exploration, and problems involved launching samples from a canister
launcher, clearing dust from a solar panel, and freeing a rover stuck in a sand
dune. Kids work together with adult mentors and coaches to design and program
solutions to these challenges. Then they meet in friendly competition to demonstrate
their work.

I said that FIRST LEGO League was a vehicle for learning about robotics, but
that’s an oversimplification. In fact, it’s backwards! My observation is that
robotics are used as a vehicle for imparting important life skills such as teamwork,
conflict resolution, problem-solving, the ability to think logically. Kids make
friends, experience the joy of working together for a common goal, and the competition,
which is really against themselves rather than each other, is a chance to show
off what they’ve learned. Amongst all this, some will no doubt be turned on
to science and technology, but that doesn’t really matter, because the other
lessons are so much more important.

The Blue Wizards, as did each of the other teams in the tournament, appeared
before three sets of judges to give three presentations:

• A presentation about their ability to work together as a team, how they
  divided the work, how they resolved conflicts, how they went about recruiting
  new members, and so forth.
• A science presentation on some aspect of Mars exploration. This is where
  that cardboard device came into play.
• A presentation on the design decisions and tradeoffs made while designing
  and programming their robot to solve the challenges in the competition.

These presentations are more like question-and-answer sessions, and sometimes
the judges ask some tough questions. Just why did the Blue Wizards choose to
power their MAV using a small, nuclear reactor? I’ll leave you to ponder that
question, but suffice it to say that the team had a good answer to give the
judges.

And what about that cardboard apparatus? You can see it below, fully populated
by the various "devices". Each team member represented a different
device such as the nuclear reactor, the Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR)
device, and so forth. Each member spoke in turn about what he represented, how
such a device would function, and the device’s purpose on a Mars Ascent Vehicle.
It was a very engaging presentation, all-in-all much better than many corporate,
Powerpoint presentations that I’ve seen. Sometimes low-tech is best.

The presentations come in the morning, and they’re followed in the afternoon
by three rounds in which each team fields its robot to perform the tasks specified
for the competition. These robotics rounds are the most publicly visible part
of the tournament, and it’s great fun to watch as each robot performs its assigned
tasks. Points are given for each successfully performed task.

I was very impressed by the tournament, and by the kids I met and talked with.
Dean Kamen may be well-known as the inventor of the Segway, but I think his
organization’s LEGO League idea will have a far greater and longer-lasting impact.
My son Jeff and I had a great time at the tournament. My thanks to that former
member of the Muk-Town Klash Nebula team who gave my son (who is days
away from being eight ) one of those team pendants on a beaded necklace. He
wore that all day long. You really made his day, more than you probably realize.

Agent is back! For those
who don’t know, Agent is a combination mail/newsreader, and it’s one of the
most delightful and powerful software programs I’ve ever run. Agent had multithreading, for example, well ahead of Microsoft Outlook. I could read and respond to messages at the same time that Agent was downloading and uploading them. It was, and is, a great product.

I go way
back with Agent, having begun with version 0.99 in I’m not sure what year,
but perhaps 1994 or 1995. Agent was developed by a company called Forte, which
was acquired in 1998 by a company known as Genesys, which bought Forte for other
reasons and didn’t care about Agent. Thus, Agent almost died off, and it would
have been a real tragedy for the world to lose such a well-crafted piece of
software.

Even today, Agent is a very capable email client, and it’s still the best newsreader
I know of for the Windows platform, or perhaps for any operating-system. I moved
away from Agent, to use The
Bat!, only because of a need to deal with two email accounts. Agent didn’t
do multiple accounts. I gave my Agent license to my wife after she got hit with
an Outlook payload, and she’s had not a lick of trouble with malware in the
year and a half since.

Agent is, in a small way, responsible for my writing career. When a SAMS Publishing
editor first contacted me by email in 1997 about writing a book, I took the
note to be spam and deleted it. Two days later I thought better, pulled the
note back out of my "Trash" folder, and made the phone call that changed
the course of my life. Had it not been for Agent’s Trash folder, I’d, well,
I just hate to think about how close a call that was.

In 2001, Agent’s original authors got back together, bought back the rights
to their creation, and began planning for Agent 2.0, which entered beta on November
13 this year. To my delight, and I’m sure that of thousands of Agent users,
the 2.0 version will support multiple email accounts, and even multiple news
servers. I can’t wait to see what else has been added. Kudos to Agent’s authors
for their tenacity in breathing life back into such a wonderful and useful product.

Friday I had great fun visiting a Lego Robotics class at Great
Lakes Adventist Academy in Cedar Lake, Michigan. I’m learning that many
schools teach classes involving Lego
Mindstorms, a family of Lego products combining the study of robotics and
programming. There’s even an international competion run by First
Lego League International. I’m very interested in all this.

Friday’s class began with one team finishing a previously assigned problem
that involved having their robot push black film-canisters out of a circle while
leaving white film-canisters in place inside the circle. There were a few bugs
to begin with, but after a few trial runs and adjustments the team managed to
produce a working solution. Cool!

The teacher then gave out the next problem, a rather interesting "enhancement"
of the previous. I was impressed at the way team members worked together to
attack the new challenge. I was even more impressed when I saw students reusing
code, building their new program using previously developed solutions for simpler
problems. For example, the students all seemed to have a canned line-following
routine that they could just drop-in when needed.

Lego Mindstorms look to be a really fun way to develop logic and problem-solving
skills. And when you’re done writing a program, you have something tangible
that anyone, programmer or non-programmer, can appreciate. Kids today sure are
lucky.

I want to learn more. Post below, or drop me a line (jgennick@oreilly.com) if you’re using Lego Mindstorms at school. Let me know what you’re doing and how it’s working.

Related link: http://four.pairlist.net/pipermail/oracle-article/2003/000008.html

Every month I send out an article to the Oracle-article email list. December’s article shows a solution to a problem posed by a reader who needed Oracle SQL*Loader to skip records in which all fields were NULL. You can read the article at the following URL:

http://four.pairlist.net/pipermail/oracle-article/2003/000008.html.