FIRST

What is FIRST?

FIRST is an acronym for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. FIRST is the largest high school robotics organization in the world, supporting 1303 teams in 7 countries. FIRST organizes an annual global competition with 37 regional events and a championship at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia. RAWC has been participating since 2002 within FIRST.

FRIST Robotics Competition

The first program developed through FIRST was the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), which is designed to inspire high school students to become engineers by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers to develop a robot. The inaugural FIRST Robotics Competition was held in 1992 in the Manchester Memorial High School gymnasium. As of 2007, over 1300 high school teams totaling over 32,306 students from Brazil, Canada, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, the United States, the , and more compete in the annual competition. The competition challenge changes each year, and the teams cannot reuse components created for previous robots. The robots weigh around 120 pounds (depending on the current year’s rules). The kit issued to each team contains a base set of parts. Details of the game are released at the beginning of January, and the teams are given six weeks to construct a competitive robot that can accomplish the game’s tasks. In 2007, teams competed in 37 regional competitions throughout March in an effort to qualify for the FIRST Championship in Atlanta, Georgia in April. Previous years’ Championships have been held in Houston, Texas and at Walt Disney World’s Epcot.