On October 23rd, 2010, Livingston Robotics Club (LRC) was among dozens of exhibitors at the 2010 NJ RoboFest held at Clifton High School, as a part of New Jersey Science and Engineering Festival. The festival was one of satellite events of USA Science and Engineering Festival taking place at the same time in Washington, D.C. and throughout the nation this past weekend.

Children of all ages were very excited at the full range of robotics demonstrations and a live robotics competition at RoboFest 2010 this weekend. The festivity was to showcase robotics work from K-12 students, college students, to industrial robotics applications. LRC teams hosted and participated in four out of 26 RoboFest exhibitions to display three divisions of FIRST robotics programs, provided insightful information for Kindergarten to high school level, including Jr. FIRST LEGO League, FIRST LEGO League, MoonBots and participated in the FIRST Tech Challenge scrimmage.

LRC was the host of the Junior FIRST LEGO League (Jr.FLL) workshop. The workshop provided opportunity for children ages 6-9 to build their own models using LEGO robotics elements and to try robotics programming for the first time using LEGO WeDo kit. Two LRC Jr.FLL teams, Legobotics and Spongebots, with team members from grades 1 to 3 showcased their work from last season and discussed their participation in the LRC Jr.FLL Expo last May to inspire young children to participate in the program for this season.

Landrias, an all-girl team from LRC, exhibited their “Body Forward” research project and their robot missions to 4,000 visitors. As part of their current participation of FIRST LEGO League robotics program for children ages 9-14, the team engaged in a community outreach effort by showing their robot design and NXT-G programs to complete the “Body Forward” robotics missions related to the theme of Biomedical Engineering. The team also presented their “Body Forward” science research and product design to help asthma patients to live a better life. The presentation was met with great reception from children and parents.

Landroids, a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) team from LRC participated in New Jersey FTC Scrimmage on October 23rd and won the “Think Award” for their engineering notebook. The live action of these metallic robots offered visitors an endless excitement of the competition. Also, as the international 1st place winner of the Google Lunar XPRIZE MoonBots Challenge, Landroids hosted an interactive MoonBots Exhibition, complete with behind-the-scene videos and photos from their Denmark trip visiting the LEGO Group. The team displayed their award winning robot and set up the MoonBots Challenge field for a large crowd of children to control a robot on a simulated moon surface.

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