#1519 “Mechanical Mayhem” – Milford Area Homeschoolers – Milford, N.H.
#1058 “PVC Pirates” – Londonderry High School – Londonderry, N.H.
#1073 “The Force Team” – Hollis-Brookline High School – Hollis, N.H.

The 2010 Granite State FIRST Regional Robotics Finalists are:

#134 “Team Discovery” – Pembroke Academy – Pembroke, N.H.
#1922 “OzRam” – Hopkinton and John Stark High Schools – Contoocook and Weare, N.H.
#78 “Airstrike” – Aquidneck Island Robotics 4-H Club – Newport County, R.I.

Congratulations to everyone!

MANCHESTER, N.H. – The 2010 Granite State Regional FIRST Robotics competition, sponsored by BAE Systems, brings students and their mentors together in a two-day competition that emphasizes teamwork, innovation, and strategy.

The first day of competition ended with several teams receiving awards:

* The Outstanding Volunteer Award went to Luan and Mike Heimlich, a New Hampshire couple who moved to Australia in 2009 and began the FIRST program there – bringing the country’s first FIRST team back for the Granite State Regional.
* The Imagery Award went to South Portland High School in Maine, for their attractiveness in engineering and outstanding visual aesthetic integration from the machine to the team appearance.
* Trinity High School from Manchester, N.H., received the Engineering Excellence Award. The award recognizes an elegant and advantageous machine feature. The team’s hurdling arm was particularly effective in game play.
* Milford Area Youth Homeschoolers Enriching Minds from Milford, N.H., received the Rockwell Automation Innovation in Control Award for an innovative control system or application of control components to provide unique machine functions. The award recognized the team’s powered mechanical system to manipulate the ball.
* The Xerox Creativity Award went to Walpole High School from Walpole, Mass. The award celebrates creative design, use of a component, or a creative or unique strategy of play. The team used a center pivot design for their frame.
* The Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers Entrepreneurship Award went to Shenendehowa High School from Clifton Park, N.Y. The award honors a team that is unique, enthusiastic and well organized, and one whose well-honed business skills will keep them operating successfully for years to come. This rookie team of freshmen and sophomores assembled a team handbook that included a long-term strategy.
* Manchester High School West from Manchester, N.H., received the Website Award, which recognizes excellence in student-designed, built and managed FIRST team site.
* The Rookie Inspiration Award recognizes outstanding effort as a FIRST team in community outreach and recruiting students to engineering. The award went to the Local Supporters and Safford Robotics Group from Hollis, N.H.
* Jeff Reuter a team mentor for Hollis-Brookline High School in Hollis, N.H., received the Dr. Woodie Flowers Award that honors outstanding contributions to the mission of FIRST.

Final rounds are scheduled to start at 1 p.m. Saturday, March 6. The Granite State Regional Finals will broadcast live play-by-play action from noon to 3 p.m. The broadcast will be hosted by Tech Talk’s Craig Peterson. The competition will be on WGIR locally, and will be streamed on the internet at http://www.iheartradio.com.
All times are subject to change. The event is open to the public. Admission is free, and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

We’ve put up a Facebook Page for fans of the show to follow us and contribute to the show.  Follow us at our new Facebook Tech Talk With Craig Peterson Page.

We’re going to be covering the FIRST competition live in Manchester, NH on Saturday the 6th of March. For more visit BAE System’s FIRST Regional Web Site We’ll also be carrying our live play-by-play online at WGIR AM

We’re scheduled to talk with the Presidents of BAE Systems, the host of the event, both national and regional. Lots of engineers, teams and of course politicians.  Even the Governor has asked to be on the show.

Fun for the whole family, free to attend and it’s even educational. Join us on Saturday from Noon to 4 or 5pm as we cover the event at the Verizon Wireless arena in Manchester, NH.

FIRST – For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology – designs accessible and innovative programs for young people to help build their self-confidence, knowledge and life skills. The programs motivate students to pursue careers in science, technology and engineering.

The Granite State Regional, sponsored by BAE Systems, brings more than 1,500 students and their mentors together in a competition that emphasizes teamwork, innovation and strategy. In early January, teams received a challenge to design, develop and build a robot in six weeks using a common parts list. The robots compete in randomly selected alliances, performing a variety of tasks for scoring points.

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• Radio Broadcast of the FIRST Regional Competition in Manchester (CraigPeterson.com)
• Dean Kamen’s 2010 Homework (radar.oreilly.com)

Historically we’ve had some trouble finding volunteers to:

- Help with the play-by-play on-air.  This needs to be someone who is very familiar with the game and the teams and who is great on-air with me.  Usually we’re on the floor talking about the teams and the game during the finals.  They also need to bring noise-resistant headphones and/or ear buds with sound deadening headphones that can plug into our wireless receiver that they wear on their belt to be able to hear me, the station and other hosts that I’ve invited.

- Someone to track the score and put together playoff charts down on the floor (as well as before the finals, but it’s a little less urgent).  As we’re doing the play-by-play during the finals we need to know instantly what the score is, who the contenders are, what the current round is and who’s moving on to the next round.  It’s difficult to track all that while we’re on the air.

- Pre-show research.  We need to have background information about every team along with some interesting tidbits that we can use to talk about while we’re on the air.  Karen (my wife) has been putting some of this together over the past few years by scraping information from the teams’ web sites she’s found, but it’s not ideal.  Ideally this volunteer would contact the teams and get some cool information from them, too.

If they really wanted to go above-and-beyond it would be great to get pre-recorded “Hello!” messages from the teams.  If they co-ordinated it with Karen we could set up a telephone patch before the regional, have the team get around a speakerphone and say something like “Hello!  This is team 1590, Mechanical Meyhem from Milford, NH” or something similar.  This would be fun to air when the team goes to the floor for competition.  It would be difficult to get this type of information the day of the event.

- A volunteer to rustle up a team member from time-to-time to talk about what just happened on the floor.

That’s the main stuff.  We’ve got volunteers from the radio station who will get everything set up for us…

If you’re interested in helping out, post me a comment.

Steve Hudson, Omnilink Location Aware Devices;
Andrew Hansen, InStoreSolutions from noon to 12:30

Abbas Mehdi, Iolo PC Tuneup;
Aaron Patzer, Intuit Mint;
Tom Adams, Rosetta Stone from 12:30 to 1:20

Just Sabeti, PeerlessMounts on TV Mounts;
Richard Surace, PlumChoice on Tech Support from 1:20pm to 1:45

Bill Nguyen, IoGear Wireless Solutions;
Janice Mahon, UniversalDisplay;
James Bak, Ford Sync at 2pm

Oz Zimmerman, DSP Group;
Max Safari, Neato Robotics;
Pete Janssen, Wellcore Senior Monitoring starting at 2:15pm

You’ll be able to listen live from anywhere in the world at http://wgiram.com and we’ll try and post a recording of the regionals a week or so after they air.  In years past we’ve had people in Iraq and Afghanistan listening (my guess is it’s some of our troops) and from a couple of dozen other countries.

Pass this information around as widely as possible.  Let Parents, Aunts, Uncles, Grandparents and friends know that they can listen live to the coverage of the event along with commentary and interviews with teams, officials and sponsors of the event.

Also, don’t forget to thank WGIR and WGIN for carrying the event and for their technicians and on-the-air talent for volunteering their time.  We hope to have Charlie Sherman, Angela Anderson and Erin Boss helping out me, Craig Peterson, again this year!

This is going to be a great game this year.  You can find out more by going to http://www.usfirst.org/

We’re thinking that we’ll cover it again this year, but we’ll have to find volunteers to help with the broadcast and get our local affiliate radio station (WGIR AM) to provide us with the equipment and airtime.

Do you think it’s worth it?  Let me know.  Producer at CraigPeterson.com

Ever wonder what the host of the top Technology Radio show looks like while he’s doing an interview?  How about what I look like while doing an interview? 

Brother posted a video of my interview on YouTube.  The audio’s kinda poor, but I think it’s neat…

BTW, they’ve got some _very_ cool sewing and embroidery equipment and have quite a bit of information about how to build your own at-home business using it.

YouTube – Brother Sewing – Interview with Craig Peterson at CES.