This weekend the final judging of the Linking Engineering and Philanthropy (LEAP) design contest for local FIRST Robotic FRC Teams was held at Mercy Corp in Portland Oregon. The high school FRC Team 1540 Flaming Chickens from Catlin Gabel that I have worked with for a few years founded LEAP and run it. Autodesk was again a proud sponsor with the prize money and Mercy Corp was the non profit recipient, awesome host, and defined the challenge and need for this years competition.
“Linking Engineering and Philanthropy (LEAP) is an off season event for FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) teams designed to get students to apply their engineering skills to real-world problems in their communities. Over the course of a three month competition beginning in September, teams research, design, and prototype a solution to a given humanitarian problem provided by a partnering nonprofit. As FIRST likes to say, “It’s more than just robots.”
By the end of a LEAP competition, teams will have…