Mindstorm

My first project at MIT was to create a robot out of Legos. That might not sound very high-brow, but with the way it was organized, it turned out to be a great experience. My class consists of 62 people, so they split us up into roughly 10 teams of 6 people each. They gave us Lego Mindstorm kits on Monday and told us that we had five days to create a robot that would compete with the other teams in a final "robot war" with our grade being based on how well our robot did.

Fortunately, I ended up with a great group. We gelled really quickly and had very few disagreements. It was one of those rare situations where everyone in the team got along well and there was a lot of mutual respect. While most teams were scrambling on Friday night to get their robots working, my team finished early so we went out to dinner. We were pretty confident going into the Saturday competition, but then we saw the other teams' robots and became less confident. Here is a shot of all the robots on the constructed playing surface:


There were some really good designs, a couple of which gave us a run for our money, but my team won the competition! Here is the winning team and robot:

From left to right: Jason, Ken, Robbie, Ben, Kevin, Matt