Dean Kamen's FIRST Robotics Competition for students and their mentors is back for 2005. The new game, field, rules and regulations were revealed at the Robotics Competition Kickoff, Saturday, January 8th, where teams in attendance also recieved their kit of parts. FIRST expects to involve over 25,000 students this year in more than 1000 teams from "almost every state in the U.S., as wall as from Brazil, Canada, Great Britain, Mexico, Ecaudor and Israel."

The 2005 game, "Triple Play" is a sort of massive three on three tic tac toe that takes place on a 27x54 foot field, where robots attempt to stack tetras (the game pieces are tetrahedrons in shape) in one of 9 goals. Three goals are at midfield and three at either end. Robots will claim ownership of goals by stacking tetras; the highest tetra wins the goal. Each match will last 2 and 1/4 minutes and feature two three-team alliances. The game features a mixture of autonomous and remote controlled periods, with the bulk of the match being under remote control. .

NASA has video you can download of the FIRST Robotics Competition Kickoff.

You can also download the 2005 FIRST Robotics Competition Manual, learn how to volunteer, or read the 2004 Annual Report at the FIRST Robotics Competition website.

For a history of Kamen's extraordinary engineering accomplishments (which reach far beyond the, Segway Human Transporter), FIRST has an excellent bio on Kamen.

Wondering how angry Dean Kamen is about our "sports and Hollywood obsessed culture? Click here to read Lance Ulanoff's PC Magazine article FIRST Makes Technology and Students the Stars .

This article was first published on extremetech.com.