View Live Webcasts of the McKenzie Robotics Team at the World Championship this Weekend

It’s that time again for your hometown favorites, the Mc Kenzie Career Center #1024 Kil-A-Bytes, to go head to head with the best robotics teams in the world at the FIRST Robotics World Championship! The championship will be held this weekend at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

All together, about 20,000 FIRST personnel attend or compete in the championship event. The FRC (our) division alone has 340 teams. You can read more about the different leagues of FIRST or FIRST in general at http://usfirst.org/

For our FRC league, the 340 teams are split into four divisions. Our team this year is located in the Archemedes division. Each division runs like a standard regional: each has one day of practice, one and a half days of qualifications matches, and one day of eliminations matches. However, at the end of the eliminations matches for each of the divisions, the winning alliance of three teams from that division will go on to Einstein field for the World Eliminations.

This creme of the creme of the world’s best young roboticists will then compete to decide who’s alliance will come out on top. A lot of the finals comes down pretty well to luck, as your robot, and your drive team, must run so many consecutive matches PERFECTLY to win.

Also, in the vast pit area housed in the Georgia World Congress Center near the Georgia Dome (and linked by underground tunnel) many famous faces can be spotted from Steve Wozniak to Dean Kamen to Bill Gates and more. Also, many large businesses’ executives attend Championship to seek out future employees even at the High School level… It’s a FIRST team member’s equivalent to getting scouted, so everybody comes with their best knowledge and personality on hand.

GO KIL-A-BYTES! And here’s your parade of links:

>Schedule: http://usfirst.org/uploadedFiles/Community/FRC/Events/2008/Championship/2008_CMP_PublicAgenda.pdf (remember that the web cast will only be active while matches are running)
>Webcast Links (there are six plainly labeled live feeds kindly provided by NASA’s telesciencs lab): http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/robotics/
>Team listing for our divison: http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv/event.php?eventid=185
> Our team’s progress thus far this season: http://www.thebluealliance.net/tbatv/team.php?team=1024
> Nice captioned picture of our seniors on the team, and, of course, the robot: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/31348?
> If you want to sit down and have the ULTIMATE telefan FIRST experience, and you want to sit down and watch for a while: http://gameday.soap108.com/… this incorporates simultaneous video feeds from all six live feeds with a chat room and live statistics.