The Georgia Institute of Technology will host 48 teams of middle school students competing in the State of Georgia FIRST® LEGO® League Robotics Tournament on Saturday, January 28, from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. in the Student Center. This event is free and open to the public.

FIRST® (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is an organization that was founded to inspire interest in science and engineering among young people.

Saturday's event is the State Championship and the top team of the event will advance to the World Festival in St. Louis in late April.

With this year's theme of “Food Factor: Keeping Food Safe,” students aged 9 to 14 are exploring ways to improve the quality of food and prevent food contamination. Each team has built, tested and programed an autonomous robot using LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT to solve a set of food safety missions.  On Saturday, they will be judged on their research, teamwork, robot design and robotic task.

The event is co-hosted by Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing at Georgia Tech (CEISMC), as well as the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).

So far in this year's tournament, nearly 400 teams have competed in 12 qualifiers and three super-regional contests.  Through these qualifiers, the field was narrowed to the 48 teams that will participate at the event Saturday at Tech.