The following appeared in the Boston Globe on April 29:
It is availible online, if you pay to access the Globe's archive. I got it through my school's research database (EBSCOHost).
Quote:
Bots on film
The script is still being revised, but the odds are good that ABC's "Wide World of Disney" will air a made-for-TV movie this year or in 2003 about FIRST, the New Hampshire-based high school robotics competition founded by inventor Dean Kamen. FIRST's national championships were held last week in Orlando - just after Kamen was awarded the MIT-Lemelson Program's $500,000 prize for invention.
The plot of the film focuses on a burnt-out teacher at an inner city school in California, played by Noah Wylie of "ER." Wylie's character helps organize a team of students who are building a robot to enter the FIRST competition. Several of the students are former gang members, and the competition manages to turn them around and get them on track to go to college. Their teacher, too, is recharged by the experience.
Alan Alda will play an engineer who advises the team during the robot-building process. No word yet on who might play Kamen, or even whether he'll be a character in the film. If he is, the smart money says he'll deliver his lines astride a Segway Human Transporter.
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The author is Scott Kirsner, who wrote an article for Wired about Dean Kamen, and also the thing in the New York Times a month or so ago that compared FIRST to battlebots.