One of my nerdier high school activities was participating in the Canada FIRST robotics competition. As member of the self-coined, albeit uncool, Team PHYRE (Port Hope young robotics engineers), I helped design and build a robot that played a game against competitors at other high schools across Canada. The game varied from year-to-year but usually involved collecting/shooting/storing and moving balls or pucks into a goal.

The FIRST organization has grown, now includes teams in 61 countries, and has more than 200,000 participants in three age categories taking part each year. In the 9- to 14-year-old age category, kids use Lego to construct their robots to address social problems. In the past, issues have included, biomedical engineering, nanotechnology, climate, quality of life for the handicapped population, and transportation.

In a press release, FIRST says this year’s focus is on food safety. The goal of the competition is for teams to research contamination issues and come up with some creative solutions.

From exposure to insects and creatures, to unsterile processing and transportation, to unsanitary preparation and storage – and propose solutions for preventing or combating these contaminates.

In the FOOD FACTOR® Challenge, teams will build, test, and program an autonomous robot using LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT to solve a set of food safety missions as well as research, develop, and share their innovative solutions to improve the world’s current food preparation processes.

FIRST even gets some celeb-content (at least for Top Chef Masters viewers by adding Mary-Sue Milliken as a spokesperson for the competition:

“Food safety is a brilliant theme for FIRST LEGO League because we eat every day, and it is that very ‘fuel’ affecting all the cells in our bodies,” said Milliken. “Kids love learning about food — and I’m excited to see the inventions they create to solve problems that my industry faces. “