Thanks for the great remarks. The Great Ball Contraption was conceived in Indiana back in early 2005 as a collaborative project because several of us Mindstorms geeks were tired of simply competing with each other and we wanted to work together. We debuted the first GBC at Brickfest (Washington DC) in August 2005 with about 40 working modules.
Why do all the modules seem to work well with a process flow? We actually wrote a specification for the collaborative project. You can find the requirements at
http://www.teamhassenplug.org/GBC/ if you want to try your hand at it.
GBC collaborations still happen at Brickworld (Chicago - June) and BrickFair (DC - August). They are mesmerizing to little kids.
Of course, those of us that started GBC have moved on to other challenges like Monster Chess
http://www.teamhassenplug.org/monsterchess/ that debuted at Brickworld in 2010. We will have Monster Chess on display at the event in Saint Louis next week. Stop in in your "spare" time and see it run.
GBC was a lot of fun and you learned quite a bit about the durability of plastic along the way
