I was in the department this morning when something caught my attention: one of the workstations display the Google webpage. Their logo was made up of LEGO bricks! Later on, Slashdot posted the article about the 50th Anniversary of the LEGO brick. So that was the occassion. LEGO made a significant contribution in my life. Aside from having the toy bricks during childhood, my research career came from a LEGO related project:

• Robotag: The Implementation of a Robotic Kit that Combines Primitive Behavior to Promote Higher Levels of Competence - this was the title of my senior research project in Philippine Science High School. It brought me to places like the Intel Philippine Science Fair. I enjoyed meeting from around the Philippines and some of which I met during college.
• My project gave me enough experience to be a facilitator for PSHS-SEI (Science Education Institute) robotics workshop. It was a summer workshop for science teachers around the Philippine to prepare them for teaching a robotics elective in their respective high schools. The government gave away LEGO Mindstorms kits to each school. This was also my first paycheck as a “professional”!
• I was invited to give a talk on mechanical design of robots using LEGO bricks. It was an introductory workshop for high school teachers to prepare for the Philippine Robot Olympiad. The event was sponsored by Felta, Inc. the distributor of LEGO Dacta, the educational kit version of the Mindstorms system. The PSHS-SEI robotics program on the other hand used the commercial editions of the set distributed by Giftgate.

Here is my presentation on mechanical design a few years back. I discussed different types of joints and elaborated on the weakness and stress of the different types. It was basically a vector mechanics lecture using LEGO bricks for visualization. Additional slides are included elaborating on documenting your creations using LEGO cad software like MLCad and ldraw.

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