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Special Olympics makes technological leaps and bounds with help from Microsoft

Each year, Special Olympics International and its 220 chapters worldwide organize some 108,000 events. The games give athletes with intellectual disabilities the opportunity to compete in everything from basketball to bocce, gymnastics to judo. The group’s lofty goal is to “transform lives through the joy of sport,” which has the added benefit of helping erode misconceptions about its athletes. But until recently, one of the heaviest lifts for the nonprofit came from the basic mechanics of running their signature sporting events. There was the job of registering athletes, setting up the matches and competitions and scrambling to tally scores. People… Read More

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Seattle makes history with first Special Olympics robotics championship

Seattle’s Pacific Science Center is busy on your average weekend, but this past Saturday it was bursting. Between the life-sized bug exhibit and the dome of the Boeing IMAX theater, a unique competition was taking place. Students paced between swarms of supporters and the edges of four square arenas that were taped onto the carpet. They tuned out the sounds of the crowd to focus on the plastic-on-plastic crash of their robots — battling sumo-style to push competitors out of the ring. This was the scene at the first ever Unified Robotics Championship. The contest had all the trappings of a high… Read More

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