[Tristan Lall]

The University of Waterloo uses them in the first year of the mechatronics engineering program. But truth be told, the projects that I've seen (coming out of the first-year MTE 100 class) were generally on the level of a mid-range FLL team. It's only speculation, but maybe if they'd spent less time trying to rigourously teach the programming, and more time on just playing with the Lego, they would have had better success as compared to the twelve-year-olds. (Granted, this project is but one of many academic demands that the 'trons have to deal with; so I could see it being less-than-top-priority.)

On the other hand, FIRST is very well known to the mechatronics faculty and students; maybe in time, some ex-FLL students will enrol, and do something a bit more impressive.