FIRST Robotics Competition
The first and highest scale program developed through FIRST is the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), which is designed to inspire high school students to become engineers by giving them real world experience working with engineers to develop a robot. The inaugural FIRST Robotics Competition was held in 1992 in the Manchester Memorial High School gymnasium. As of 2009, over 3,000 high school teams totaling over 46,000 students from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Turkey, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more compete in the annual competition.
The competition challenge changes each year, and the teams can only reuse certain components from previous years. The robots weigh about 150 lb (68 kg), including batteries and bumpers, depending on that year's rules. The kit issued to each team contains a base set of parts. Registration and the kit of parts together cost about US$6000. In addition to that, teams are allowed to spend another $3500 on their robot. The purpose of this rule is to lessen the influence of money on teams' competitiveness. Details of the game are released on the first Saturday in January (except when that Saturday falls on January 1 or 2), and the teams are given six weeks to construct a robot that can accomplish the game's tasks.
In 2011, teams participated in 48 regional and district competitions throughout March in an effort to qualify for the FIRST Championship in St. Louis in April. Previous years' Championships have been held in Atlanta, Georgia, Houston, Texas and at Walt Disney World's Epcot. On October 7, 2009, FIRST announced that the Championship Event will be held in St. Louis, Missouri for 2011 through 2013. Each year the FIRST Robotics Competition has scholarships for the participants in the program. In 2011 there are over $14 million worth of scholarships from more than 128 colleges and universities, associations, and corporations.
Read more about this topic: For Inspiration And Recognition Of Science And Technology
Famous quotes containing the word competition:
“Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.”
—Jean François Lyotard (b. 1924)