FIRST and 2.007 reunite.

[ZZII 527]

A long, long time ago, before there was FIRST, there was 2.70 at MIT. 2.70 was an annual design competition for MIT Mechanical Engineering students. The professor was none other than Woodie Flowers. Since then, Woodie joined forces with Dean Kamen to start a wonderful thing called FIRST Robotics. Much of the inspiration for FIRST came from the 2.70 competition. 2.70 is now called 2.007, but it's still an annual thing at MIT. This year's competition was (coincidentally) called Tic-Tech-Toe and was held the past two nights. The MIT-mentored FIRST team used to do demos at 2.007 but hasn't in recent years - until now. We got some airtime on the webcast too! We threw around a nice shiney blue Tetra and Professor Slocum of 2.007 came up with a new task for us which we failed miserably at...but made up for it by coming up with a creative solution to his "pushup" challenge. The video stream of the entire 2.007 competition is here:

Thursday:
http://web.mit.edu/webcast/2.007/200...ay2005-80k.ram

Friday:
http://web.mit.edu/webcast/2.007/200...ay2005-80k.ram

You'll see that although FIRST has scaled everything up, the concepts are similar.

FIRST is on the Friday stream from about 1:12:00 to 1:28:00. Make sure you check out our push-up solution toward 1:27:00!