FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is an international high school robotics competition. Each year, teams of high school students, coaches, and mentors work during a six-week period to build robots capable of competing in that year's game that weigh up to 125 pounds (57 kg). Robots complete tasks such as scoring balls into goals, hanging on bars, placing objects in predetermined locations, and balancing robots on various field elements. The game, along with the required set of tasks, changes annually. While teams are given a kit of a standard set of parts during the annual Kickoff, they are also allowed and encouraged to buy or fabricate specialized parts. FIRST Robotics Competition is one of five robotics competition programs organized by FIRST, the other four being FIRST LEGO League Discover, FIRST LEGO League Explore, FIRST LEGO League Challenge, and FIRST Tech Challenge.
Current season, competition or edition: Crescendo (FIRST) | |
 | |
| Sport | Robotics-related games |
|---|---|
| Founded | Dean Kamen Woodie Flowers |
| First season | 1992 |
| Commissioner | Collin Fultz |
| Motto | "More Than Robots" |
| No. of teams | 3,468 (2024) |
| Countries | 28 countries and regions |
| Most recent champion(s) | 1690 - "Orbit" 4522 - "Team Scream" 9432 - "Team 8-Bit" 321 - "RoboLancers" (2024) |
| Most titles | 254 - "The Cheesy Poofs" (5 championship wins) |
The culture of FIRST Robotics Competition is built around two values. "Gracious Professionalism" embraces the competition inherent in the program but rejects trash talk and chest-thumping, instead embracing empathy and respect for other teams. "Coopertition" emphasizes that teams can cooperate and compete at the same time. The goal of the program is to inspire students to be science and technology leaders.
2022 was the 31st year of the competition. 3,225 teams, including more than 80,000 students and 25,000 mentors from 26 countries, built robots. The 2022 season included 58 Regional Competitions, 90 District Qualifying Competitions, and 11 District Championships. In 2022, over 450 teams won slots to attend the FIRST Championship event, where they competed in a tournament. In addition to on-field competition, teams and team members competed for awards recognizing entrepreneurship, creativity, engineering, industrial design, safety, controls, media, quality, and exemplifying the core values of the program. As a result of COVID-19, the amount of active teams decreased during the 2021 season; however, numbers began to increase during the 2022 season.
As of 2023, there were 3,300 high school teams with approximately 83,000 high schoolers across 31 countries competing.
Most teams reside in the United States, with Canada, Turkey, Mexico, Israel, China, and Australia contributing significant numbers of teams.
History
FIRST was founded in 1989 by American inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen, with inspiration and assistance from physicist and MIT professor emeritus Woodie Flowers. Kamen was disappointed with the number of kids—particularly women and minorities—who did not consider science and technology careers and decided to do something about it. As an inventor, he looked for activities that captured the enthusiasm of students and decided that combining the excitement of sports competition with science and technology had the potential to inspire students.
Distilling what sports had done right into a recipe for engaging young people, Kamen says, turned out to be relatively straightforward. "It's after school, not in school. It's aspirational, not required," he explained to me.
"You don't get quizzes and tests, you go into competitions and get trophies and letters. You don't have teachers, you have coaches. You nurture, you don't judge. You create teamwork between all the participants. We justify sports for teamwork but why, when we do it in the classroom, do we call it cheating?"
Most of all, it was a nonjudgmental space, where in contrast science and math in traditional educational settings had been soured with embarrassment and uncertainty.
Kamen has stated that FIRST is the invention he feels most proud of and predicts that participants will be responsible for significant technological advances in years to come. The first FIRST Robotics Competition season was in 1992 and had one event at a high school gymnasium in New Hampshire. That first competition was relatively small-scale, similar in size to today's FIRST Tech Challenge and Vex Robotics Competition games. Robots relied on a wired connection to receive data from drivers; in the following year, it quickly transitioned to a wireless system.
Teams
3,304 teams from 31 countries competed in 2023 Charged Up. Of these, 3,036 are "veteran teams" (meaning they have competed in a previous season), and 268 are "rookie teams" (meaning that 2023 was their first season of competition).
The countries represented are listed below: (in decreasing order of number of teams as of 2023)
- United States of America (2,685)
- Canada (190)
- Turkey (131)
- Mexico (85)
- Israel (67)
- Brazil (41)
- Australia (40)
- Chinese Taipei (25)
- China (10)
- Colombia (4)
- Netherlands (4)
- Dominican Republic (3)
- France (3)
- India (3)
- Japan (3)
- United Kingdom (3)
- Poland (2)
- Azerbaijan (1)
- Barbados (1)
- Bulgaria (1)
- Croatia (1)
- Czech Republic (1)
- Indonesia (1)
- Lesotho (1)
- Pakistan (1)
- Panama (1)
- Romania (1)
- Singapore (1)
- Switzerland (1)
- Vietnam (1)
Competition
FIRST Championship
The FIRST Championship is the culmination of the FIRST Robotics Competition season, and occurs in late April each year. Roughly 800 teams participated in two Championship events in 2018, held in April in Houston, Texas and Detroit, Michigan. After the 2022 championships concluded FIRST announced that the world championship would take place at a single location, Houston, Texas, for the 2023 and 2024 seasons.
Media exposure
The PBS documentary "Gearing Up" followed four teams through the 2008 season.
In the television series Dean of Invention, Dean Kamen made appeals promoting FIRST prior to commercial breaks.
In 2008, FRC Team 1114, Simbotics, was featured in an ongoing storyline on the hit Canadian TV drama "Degrassi: Next Generation". Team 1114's 2006-2007 world champion VEX robot made an appearance, as well as their 2008 world champion FRC robot.
During the 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition season, FIRST team 3132, Thunder Down Under, was followed by a Macquarie University student film crew to document the first year of FIRST Robotics Competition in Australia. The crew produced a documentary film called I, Wombot. The film premiered during the 2011 Dungog Film Festival.
A book called The New Cool was written by Neal Bascomb about the story of Team 1717 from Goleta, California as they competed in the 2009 game season. A movie adaptation directed by Michael Bacall is being produced.
The CNN documentary "Don't Fail Me: Education in America", which aired on May 15, 2011, followed three FIRST Robotics Competition teams during the 2011 season. The documentary profiled one student from each team, covering different geographic and socioeconomic levels: Shaan Patel from Team 1403 Cougar Robotics, Maria Castro from Team 842 Falcon Robotics, and Brian Whited from Team 3675 Eagletrons.
On August 14, 2011, ABC aired a special on FIRST called "i.am FIRST: Science is Rock and Roll" that featured many famous musical artists such as The Black Eyed Peas and Willow Smith. will.i.am himself was the executive producer of the special. The program placed a special focus on the FIRST Robotics competition, even though it included segments on the FIRST Tech Challenge, FIRST LEGO League, and FIRST LEGO League Jr.
From 1996 to 1998, the FIRST Championship was covered by ESPN.
For the 2013 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, five FIRST Robotics Competition teams and their robots led the parade, with one robot cutting the ribbon and the others shooting confetti.
In the 2014 movie Transformers: Age of Extinction, a FIRST Robotics Competition Robot built by Team 2468, Team Appreciate, for the 2012 Season was featured in Cade Yeager's garage shooting the foam basketball game pieces from Rebound Rumble.
The 2015 Kickoff was, for the first time, broadcast by NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast, and was available via OnDemand for the month of January 2015.
In 2016, Christina Li, a member of Team 217, the ThunderChickens, was spotlighted on an episode of Nickelodeon's The Halo Effect entitled "Hello World". A coding camp that Li organized for young girls was featured on the episode, and 217's robot from the 2015 season made an appearance.
The fourth season of The Fosters (2013 TV series) had several episodes featuring characters competing in a regional FIRST Robotics Competition competition, most notably episode 8 "Girl Code".
In June 2018, HBO aired a Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel episode, which in a segment, the correspondent Soledad O'Brien interviewed Dean Kamen about FIRST and FIRST Robotics Competition and then later interviewed students from various FRC teams.
The February 25, 2020 episode of the ABC sitcom Black-ish features recurring character, Jack Johnson, joining a FIRST team—and a cameo by Dean Kamen.
Episode 6 in the second season of the Netflix original series Trinkets featured a FIRST Robotics Competition competition.
On March 18, 2022, Disney+ released a documentary directed by Gillian Jacobs titled "More than Robots", which follows four teams in the 2020 season, leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Notable people
Alumni
Employees and volunteers
- Joseph Bouchard
- Michael Dubno
- Amber Gell
- Marc Hodosh, entrepreneur, chairman of the Boston FIRST Robotics Competition competition
- Mark Leon, NASA researcher and Master of Ceremonies for several FIRST Robotics Competition events
- David Siegel
Mentors
- Amir Abo-Shaeer (Team 1717), teacher and engineer, subject of The New Cool
- Emma Dumont
- Maor Farid
- Patrick Freivald (Team 1551)
- Grant Imahara (Team 841), engineer and roboticist, former cast member of MythBusters
- Dave Lavery (Team 116), NASA scientist and former member of the FIRST Robotics Competition Game Design Committee
- Nic Radford (Team 118)
- Nancy Yasecko (Team 233)
Games
| Year | Theme | Number of participants | Number of teams | Number of official events |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1992 | Maize Craze | 28 | ||
| 1993 | Rug Rage | 25 | ||
| 1994 | Tower Power | 43 | ||
| 1995 | Ramp 'n Roll | 59 | ||
| 1996 | Hexagon Havoc | 94 | ||
| 1997 | Toroid Terror | 151 | ||
| 1998 | Ladder Logic | 199 | ||
| 1999 | Double Trouble | 271 | ||
| 2000 | Co-Opertition FIRST | 372 | ||
| 2001 | Diabolical Dynamics | 515 | ||
| 2002 | Zone Zeal | 642 | ||
| 2003 | Stack Attack | 787 | ||
| 2004 | FIRST Frenzy: Raising the Bar | 927 | ||
| 2005 | Triple Play | 25,000 | 991 | |
| 2006 | Aim High | 1,133 | 33 | |
| 2007 | Rack 'n Roll | 32,675 | 1,307 | 37 |
| 2008 | FIRST Overdrive | 38,000 (est.) | 1,501 | |
| 2009 | Lunacy | 42,000+ | 1,683 | 49 |
| 2010 | Breakaway | 45,000+ | 1,808 | 53 |
| 2011 | Logo Motion | 51,000+ | 2,072 | 59 |
| 2012 | Rebound Rumble | 59,000+ | 2,343 | 70 |
| 2013 | Ultimate Ascent | 63,000+ | 2,546 | 78 |
| 2014 | Aerial Assist | 68,000 | 2,727 | 99 |
| 2015 | Recycle Rush | 72,500 (est.) | 2,900 | 110 |
| 2016 | FIRST Stronghold | 78,500 | 3,140 | 127 |
| 2017 | FIRST Steamworks | 84,000 | 3,357 | 146 |
| 2018 | FIRST Power Up | 91,500 | 3,660 | 160 |
| 2019 | Destination: Deep Space | 95,050 | 3,802 | 175 |
| 2020 | Infinite Recharge | 97,850 | 3,914 | 52 |
| 2021 | Infinite Recharge (2021) | 52,340 | 3,079 | 0 |
| 2022 | Rapid React | 70,800+ | 3,225 | 159 |
| 2023 | Charged Up | 83,600+ | 3,304 | 167 |
| 2024 | Crescendo | 3,468 | 172 | |
| 2025 | Reefscape |
Gallery
- Intermission during Aim High in Los Angeles, encouraging teams to socialize
- The 2006 Triplets of 1114, 1503, and 1680. 1114 and 1503 won 3 regionals each, while 1680 won a silver finalist medal and was a quarterfinalist twice.
- Competition at the 2008 Hawaii regionals.
- "Barrage", Team 254's 2014 World Champion FRC robot
- The playing field in 2024 at the PNW Glacier Peak event
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