THE NT BEST
The BEST (Boosting Engineering Science and Technology) competition was created by Ted Mahler and Steve Marum. They both worked at Texas Instruments as engineers. After corresponding with MIT University they presented their idea to Texas Instruments management. With approval from the general purpose logic manager at Sherman the BEST competition was established. Since San Antonio had a similar program, the two sites decided to meet the next year for a state playoff. In 1995 Texas BEST became an annual event that was sponsored by Texas Instruments and Texas A&M University.
What is BEST? The simple answer is a robotics competition. However, it is much more complicated than that. Every year, teams sign up for the competition, and every year the competition is different. This years competition theme is BUGS, and its basic story is fairly simple. A company experimented on genetically modified bugs, and tried to make them better. However, some of them got away and went into a construction area. They don't want the bugs harmed, so they called on us (each team that signed up) to come extract them and keep them safe.
Texoma Home Educators (THE) is one team who is returning to compete in the BEST program in 2011. We have had a legacy of doing well in the BEST part of the competition, but there are other teams who do well in the robot competition. We are a group of home schooled students from the northern Texas area, who first competed in the BEST competition in 1998, five years after the beginning of the competition. We are only one of many teams who will be competing this year.