Anyone on here a fellow FIRSTer?

[The Serpent Merchant]

For those who don't know what FIRST is it is a series of robotics competitions for kids between elementary age and college. The flagship competition is the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) in this high school students have 6 weeks to build a robot that can compete in the game. Students go to a kickoff event the first Saturday of each year to find out what this years game is and get the password to the rule book (which is usually about 100 pages long). FIRST only allows certain parts and materials can be used and there are strict size and weight limits. Robots weigh up to 120 lbs plus the weight of the battery.

during the kick off event they unveil the game for the year with an animation like this one:

http://youtu.be/nzpoMzLMhcw

and then your off. you have 6 weeks to design, prototype, refine your design, manufacture, and test your robot. all while still being a high school student with homework. once the 6 weeks is up the robot is shipped to the teams first competition. the team will show up to the competition and compete. if something breaks then you have to fix it in your pit. sometimes there is only 5 minutes between matches so this can be a very high stress environment. once the competition is over the robot gets shipped directly to the teams next competition, and the process repeats. Most teams go to 3 or 4 competitions and if you are lucky enough you will qualify for the world championships. My team has qualified for the world championships every single year since its creation 15years ago. FIRST celebrated its 20 birthday this past year, and is still growing exponentially. Here is a video produced by first for the championship event

You can see a robot from my team at the 8 second mark in the video (Team 79 KRUNCH)

http://youtu.be/i1QyM9WTF18

FIRST which stands for "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" is an international competition with:
293,000+ students
26,800+ teams
51,000 Mentors/adult supporters
50,000 other Volunteers (e.g. events Volunteers, Operational and Affiliate Partners)

FIRST also offers:
Nearly $14 million in college scholarships
653 scholarship opportunities
142 scholarship providers

Here is some actual game play from last years world championships that I attended:

http://youtu.be/XQ4LXehqEEQ

Here is one of the coolest robots I've ever seen and I've seen thousands of robots:

http://youtu.be/8lRtC8wBUa0

Here are some pictures and vidoes of Robots that I have Designed and/or built:

http://youtu.be/T83wQWOk7eA

Here is a T-Shirt Canon we built for our high school football games, and yes those are football players jumping back in terror when we shot it off for the first time.



Here is a video of the T-Shirt Canon firing!

http://youtu.be/u1Smz0uvua8

And a second view:

http://youtu.be/dO3z7_CKZKE

Here is my wrangling KRUNCH 12 a competition bot from 2009:



This is KRUNCH 13 Hanging plus another robot hanging off of it (almost 300 lbs of robot in the air)



This is a computer generated digital pro type I made for KRUNCH 14 2011's competition bot



Here is KRUNCH 14 about half way built:



Here is KRUNCH 14 completed and being demonstrated by me:



and here is KRUNCH 14 competing at the Florida Regional in 2011:



Thanks for reading and please leave a comment!

[Mike41793]

Looks and sounds cool but unfortunately my highschool was too small for a program like that

[The Serpent Merchant]

Looks and sounds cool but unfortunately my highschool was too small for a program like that

You would be susprized I've seen teams with only 5-10 students. Funding is almost entirely provided by sponcers so as long as you have a group of people willing to put in the time and effort it could happen.

[The Serpent Merchant]

Has anyone even heard of FIRST? I know that we aren't widely known but I didn't think that out of the number of people one this site that I would be the only one who even knew about it.