21/04/2011
At the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, a group of hackers and developers teamed up to participate in a 7-hour long hacking event, that culminated in a robotic sumo competition.
Arranged by the SuperHappyDevHouse and various partners 43 old kids (older than 18!) came to the Speakeasy bar at 6PM on Sunday 13 March to play with LEGO MINDSTORMS robots. The challenge was to build and program a sumo robot that could push out another robot from the sumo ring!
Most of the people who came to the event had never met before but joined up in teams of 3 or 4 persons, and started hacking away at building the best and strongest robot, using all their skills in designing and programming and also finding their interest in playing on the floor again!
The teams were very excited about the challenge and the closer it was to competition time, the more hectic it was for them to test and fine-tune their robots!
See the video from the event here:
In the final round Team Tiger Blood beat Team Beam Me Up’s robot in a best-of-three match. Congratulations to Tiger Blood and Beam Me Up for putting up a good fight!
The two teams won gift certificates to www.breadpig.com worth $500 and $250, respectively.
The many LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT sets were kindly sponsored by The LEGO Foundation's Care for Education program, and after the hacking event the sets were handed to the DonorsChoose organization who will distribute them to underserved schools in the US. The receiving schools will be advised directly from the DonorsChoose representatives.
Thanks goes out to all who participated at the hacking event, and to all participating partners who planned and organized, entertained and had a lot of fun with LEGO MINDSTORMS!
The LEGO MINDSTORMS Team