ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

On Friday April 26 2013, project LEGO MINDSTOR MS WAL L-E5 made it to Mars!!! That's right, NASA had a cool booth at FIRST World Championship 2013 in St-Louis with a full size replica of the Curiosity rover!  To get him to the NASA booth I got some help from the kids of Packer Collegiate Institute.   We turned little Matt's bad luck of being stuck in a wheel chair into a fun way of transporting Wall-E Later on that day, back at the LEGO MINDSTORMS booth we got the super visit of Kjeld (yes, the owner of LEGO) We where honored he joined us for this group picture. One of them even managed to get his LEGO book signed!!!  And that gave me the idea to ask if he could...   YES! so now, not only does WALL-E5 has a cool NASA sticker... he also has an autograph by Kjeld! I had an awesome time. Thank you Packer kids, thank you LEGO! Rock on LEGO MINDSTORMS!!! : . .

So last night I stayed up till 2:30AM to watch the NASA Live feed as Curiosity was doing it's remarkable landing on MARS... At the same time I was imagining how cool an NXTfied model of Curiosity would be!!  Well today I discovered that while I was just starting to think about it... a team of LEGO Robotics Expert where actually ready to show off their latest version! That's right, Doug Moran and Will Gorman were at the "Build the Future in Space" event at NASA's Kennedy Space Center with an awesome fully functional LEGO MINDSTORMS Curiosity model Check out the video of it in action: Little did I know, they did a presentation of this robot when Curiosity launched back in November 2011,  in other words, they have been working at this for as long as it took Curiosity to get to Mars!! go to Will's website to see more video and early prototypes of the LEGO MINDSTORMS Curiosity http://battlebricks.com/curiosity/ I really like how it turned out! Nice job guy...

I posted this for the photo alone, a great visual example of what the NXT can be for kids. (Click on the photo for the full effect). These kids are in a Victoria, British Columbia classroom. The teacher is giving a lesson on astronomy and the NXT is a Mars rover, picking up Martian rocks. Thanks to Tom Hawthorn .