© 2008 by Marco Ciavolino

Teams of 9 to 14-year-olds with names like botzealots, legowizards, TechnoGeeks, and smearjam will be descending on the Twin Cities campus in May for a high-energy, three-day international competition. It’s not sports, yet there will be lots of screaming and cheering.

It’s the High Tech Kids FIRST LEGO League International Open. The Institute of Technology along with the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences and the College of Biological Sciences will sponsor and host the competition, with additional support from corporate donations.

Only 96 FIRST LEGO League (FLL) teams qualify for this tournament out of an estimated 10,000 participating teams in 38 countries. FLL is a program that sprouted from FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a not-for-profit public charity founded in 1989 to inspire young people’s interest and participation in science and technology. FIRST formed an exciting alliance with the LEGO Company to create FLL, the international program where kids participate in a competition program that has a sports-like atmosphere.

Guided by a team coach and mentor, teams of up to 10 kids spend months researching and solving a real-world problem. They prepare a presentation of their research and solutions, and build a robot using engineering concepts. The effort to get kids interested in science and technology appears to be working: Last year, 47 percent of the participants stated they want to be engineers or scientists.

Watch the excitement of a FIRST LEGO League competition in a short video:

This story originally appeared in the spring 2008 issue of Legacy, a quarterly magazine for U of M donors and friends published by the University of Minnesota Foundation.