FIRST

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FIRST Logo

FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is an organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen in 1989 in order to develop ways to excite students about engineering and technology. The first event 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.

Later on, the FIRST LEGO League (FLL), a program similar to the FIRST Robotics Competition, was formed. It is aimed at younger students and utilizes Lego Mindstorms sets to build palm-sized plastic robots, rather than the person-sized metal robots that the high schoolers in the FRC build. The latest event to be added to FIRST is the FIRST Vex Challenge (started in 2005). It is designed for high school students who don't have the financial, temporal, or other resources for the FIRST Robotics Competition.

FIRST also operates FIRST Place, a facility at FIRST headquarters in Manchester, New Hampshire where FIRST holds educational programs for students and teachers.

1 FIRST Robotics Competition
2 FIRST LEGO League
3 FIRST Vex Challenge
4 Junior FIRST LEGO League
5 References
6 External links

[edit] FIRST Robotics Competition

Main article: FIRST Robotics Competition

The FIRST Robotics Competition is the premiere competition held by FIRST. As of 2006, over 1,180 high school teams totaling over 28,000 students from Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more compete to build 100-130 pound robots that can complete a task that changes every year. Teams are given a standard set of parts and the game details at the beginning of January and are given six weeks to construct a competitive robot that can accomplish the game's task. Teams compete in 33 regional competitions over several weeks in March to try and qualify for the championship event in Atlanta, Georgia in April. Previous years' championships have been held in Houston, Texas and at Walt Disney World's Epcot.^[1]

[edit] FIRST LEGO League

Main article: FIRST LEGO League

FIRST Robotics' sister organization is the FIRST LEGO League (FLL). FLL is intended to further the same ideals that the FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) does but at a middle school level. It utilizes the Lego Mindstorms for Schools educational robotics system, including ROBOLAB programming software based on National Instruments' LabView industrial control engineering software. The combination of interchangeable LEGO parts, computer 'bricks' and sensors, and the aforementioned software, provide preteens and teenagers with the capability to build reasonably complex models of real-life robotic systems.

[edit] FIRST Vex Challenge

Main article: FIRST Vex™ Challenge

The FIRST Vex Challenge is a mid-level robotics competition announced by FIRST on March 22, 2005. Its first competition was a demonstration competition at the national FIRST competition in Atlanta, GA from April 21-22, 2005.

While most FRC teams are school established in the form of clubs which require fundraisers to support a multi-thousand dollar price tag, the FIRST Vex Challenge is more public and designed for people that do not wish to join such an expensive and generally school-oriented FRC team. FVC can be built by anyone, and the kit of parts is available at Innovation First online for $300 US. FIRST Vex Challenge robots are approximately one-third the scale of their FRC counterparts. The Vex robots offer greater control over robot design than FLL through the use of Erector Set style pieces. The Erector set style pieces provide less flexibility than FRC, but provide a transition for students from the FLL competition to the FRC competition.

The FIRST Vex Challenge Demonstration at the 2005 National Competition featured a 1/3 linear scale mock-up of the 2004 FRC Competition, FIRST Frenzy: Raising the Bar.

The largest Vex competition in the United States was held at the old Anderson high school building, known as the Wigwam, on Saturday, October 14. This event was hosted as a fund raiser for team 447, Team Roboto ^{[citation needed]}.