ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

The Google Science Fair is already over and the winners have been announced at the  awards ceremony held   Monday, July 23rd, 2012  in Palo Alto, California!! LEGO, a proud partner of this awesome scientific event was present and brought along some cool MINDSTORMS robot for the finalists to play with.  Featured this year was the work of  Vassilis Chryssanthakopoulos better know to us as NeXTSTORM or the Crazy Greek Robotic Expert ;)  His Real Steel Boxing robots where there along with an army of "Muhammad Ali" (soon to be a bonus models available on the MINDSTORMS page).   He is also the brains  behind one last challenge for the finalists:  The Fusion mission: Leading scientist working for the United Nations have found out, that a fusion of selected rare metals can create a new substance and commodity that more than doubles the performance compared to using the metals individually. These metals have now been discovere...

Great news for our favourite LEGO product. The NXT was just voted "Educational Toy of the Year" at the 2010 Toy of the Year awards at ToyFair, New York. http://www.toyawards.org/ -- Damien Kee www.thenxtclassroom.com

On the official LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT News page there's an announcement that Dean Kamen , the founder of FIRST (best known amongst LEGO aficionados for the FLL sub section), has been awarded the LEGO Prize for his passionate commitment to FIRST. Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, Owner and Vice Chairman of LEGO, says "We are particularly proud to be able to honor Dean Kamen for his personal and untiring commitment to child development and learning. [...] Dean Kamen plays an immensely important role in creating a better future." The LEGO Prize was founded in 1985 by LEGO® and was last awarded in 1997. So this is a very particular honor for Mr. Kamen. Congratulations!

While not solely related to the NXT, I felt this was close enough to a lot of readers interests to post it. Kevin Clague, one of the members of the MUP program from the early days of the NXT, has been awarded the James Jessiman Memorial Award for 2007 . This award is given out to someone who has helped or contributed to the continued legacy of James Jessiman , the young man who wrote the first community LEGO design program (LDraw) and defined the early format for the data files way back in 1995. While James died at the age of 26, what he started has grown into the LDraw community, and the community and the family of James usually announce an award for someone who has been instrumental in the LDraw community. Kevin Clague has been contributing since 2002, with software like LPub and LSynth (for publishing and modeling flexible elements) as well as being a co-author of the popular book " LEGO Software Power Tools " and playing an organizational role within the LDraw organizatio...

The R&D Magazine has announced the winners of its 45th Annual Awards for Brilliant Inventions - the "Oscars of Inventions" , as The Chicago Tribune once called them. "For 45 years, the prestigious R&D 100 Awards have been helping companies provide the important initial push a new product needs to compete successfully in the marketplace. The winning of an R&D 100 Award provides a mark of excellence known to industry, government, and academia as proof that the product is one of the most innovative ideas of the year. " (cite from the R&D Magazine) "The results are incredibly diverse, spread out over 50 categories, including Energy, Environmental, Lifesciences, Process Technology, and Software, to name but a few." (cite from GearLog ) And: the LEGO(R) MINDSTORMS(R) NXT is amongst them! It's even listed as one of the 10 Most Brilliant Inventions the renowned InventorSpot has destilled from the winners...