ROBOT SHUFFLE,ROBOCUP CHANGES GUARD

Well Ive been net surfing looking for the dirt on the future of the robocup in Australia , with educational experience no longer selling Lego products.
And the latest news shows a major shuffle in the
undertaking.
Firstly NSW company Modern Teaching Aids has taken on the role of suppling LEGO to Australian schools and as of today still seem to have a distinct lack of Lego content on thier site, unlike edex ( the old supplier who has seen the light and gone to microbric) who displayed lots of infomation for the event and also ran mail lists for schools to keep in touch.
With the release of the new NXT from Lego it will be of interest to see if it is included in the robocup events.
The robocup soccer event here in Australia has seen some other micro controllers used but in the rest of the events , they seem to be stuck on uing the RCX, while this may level the playing field in some respects, I think that for the futre of our kids we need to look at more program orientated robots with more control and function, Ok lego has a large range of extra peograms on offer from third partys including great text based editors , but its still only useful for the lego range of products.
The code cant be used later in real micro processor projects made from scratch, so something like the viper from microbric which uses widely avaliable parts and chips is ideal , as the code written in BASIC can later be used directly or indirectly to program real robots and system control units in factories ,toys and heaps more.
I would have like to have seen the robocup board go for broke and allow all types of small robot kits like LEGO, Microbric viper and Ai2 as well as some of the smaller sumo platforms around from overseas , lynxmotion or solarbotics are great places to start.
So it looks like the robot revolution is being fought on the Australian front for the time being and the jury is out on whos going to hold the fort when the smoke clears from the exploding diodes...
score so far... LEVEL PEGGING from where im standing, but ask me again in a few weeks..
things have a habit of changing