Nordson ASYMTEK Mentors Students in the FIRST Robotics Competition in San Diego 2011

Teams compete March 10-12, 2011 in San Diego, California, USA.

Carlsbad, CA, USA – Nordson ASYMTEK, a leader in dispensing, coating, and jetting technologies, is once again supporting teams in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition in San Diego. This is the fifth year that the Nordson Corporation Foundation has helped sponsor the competition nationally. Nordson ASYMTEK mentors six San Diego teams.

The FIRST Robotics Competition provides an educational and engineering environment for students to learn technical and business skills that aid in future job placement. International teams, made of students and professional engineers, join to produce a robot that not only can do the task, but can compete to do it better than the robots of other teams. FIRST’s competition combines the competitiveness of real-life challenges with the fun of learning.

"It is extremely rewarding, challenging, inspiring, and fun to work alongside these students in preparing for this competition," said Stephen des Jardins, senior staff engineer, Nordson ASYMTEK. "Each robot is so different. I've been involved with the program since it began and each year the innovative design ideas and finished robots seem to surpass the previous ones."

Students design, build, and program the robots. In San Diego, sixty high school teams will compete in round-robin matches that are followed by championship elimination rounds.

Nordson ASYMTEK supports these teams:

* Canyon Crest Academy --the Aluminum Narwhals.
* Escondido Charter High School --The Daedalus Project
* Escondido Classic High School --The Camen Agents
* High Tech High, San Diego –The Holy Cows
* San Dieguito Academy --Team Paradox
* Torrey Pines High School -- Millennium Falcons

This year's challenge, LOGO MOTION is played by two competing alliances on a flat 27x54-foot field. Each alliance consists of three robots. They compete to hang as many inflated plastic shapes (triangles, circles, and squares) on their grids as they can during a 2 minute and 15 second match. The higher the teams hang their game pieces on their scoring grid, the more points their alliance receives. If teams assemble the logo pieces on their scoring grids to form the FIRST logo (triangle, circle, square, in a horizontal row in that order), the points for the entire row are doubled. This fifth annual regional event is being held at Valley View Casino Center, March 10th - 12th, 2011. The agenda can be found at http://sandiegoregional.com/?p=agenda.