Made in Blender, Animation Makes Top 5 In Autodesk Competition

About three years ago, my students and I participated in the F.I.R.S.T. Robotics Competition and we had a team of 20 animators ready, but after attending the opening ceremony we realized that you could only use 3DS Max.  We were assuming that since Autodesk just purchased Maya we would be fine, that wasn’t the case.   We had more animators then the core robotics team had builders.
That is awesome that these guys competed and did that well with Blender.  Great job guys.
*Read article below
From BlenderNation News
20 Comments Published by Tim Formica [Room335] on April 23rd, 2009 in 3D News, Contests
It's nice to see that  Autodesk is open to other "free" software in their competition. This  was sent to us by Chris Folea who wrote: "We recently created an animation for an Autodesk sponsored high school competition within the F.I.R.S.T (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics competition.
The theme was  "Use biomimicry to solve a design challenge".  Our entry took around two months to complete, mostly spent on designing, modeling, and texturing the transformer.  The competition guidelines were to create a 30 second animation using Autodesk 3ds Max, but we read the rules a bit more carefully and found out that it was legal to use Blender because it is free, so we decided to use Blender because of its fast interface. It made the top five in the entire competition but unfortunately did not win"
Congratulations to Chris and crew for making the top five!

Blenderartist discussion
You can see the other entries that we competed against here
The character used was initially designed for another competition entry for which we also used Blender.