A LEGO contest may seem trivial to an outsider, but for the 72 teams of 9-to-14-year-old students involved in Saturday’s FIRST LEGO League State Competition, building a robot that can complete an obstacle course of tasks on its own was anything but child’s play.
Chris Tourek, graduate student in mechanical engineering and FIRST Lego League planning team co-chairman, knows this firsthand — he’s volunteered and helped plan the event for seven years.
“We ran a Lego League tournament at my high school,” Tourek said. “I found out when I was a freshman at Iowa State that we also ran a tournament, so I volunteered my first year. The next year I joined the planning team and have been on the planning side ever since.”
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