Robotics Monday: New FTC Kit

It's been a strange week in terms of LEGO® robotics - there haven't been many exciting robots built this week, but the FIRST Robotics World Festival event was quite the public showcase for many teams of young roboticists, and for the hobby aspect of robotics as well. The big news, though is the New FTC kit. FTC stands for FIRST Tech Challenge; in past years, VEX kits have been used instead of LEGO kits. I'm not sure who's manufacturing the new aluminum parts, but this is apparently a whole new system that works with the Education Edition NXT kit. This is a big deal, because the VEX kits were really remote-control toys and not preprogrammed autonomous bots. A new blog devoted to FTC has more details about this hybrid kit.