FIRST Robotics Competition Blog

Virtual Kit

The Virtual Kit is now available to teams! See the details here.

Also, please note that FIRST Choice passwords posted with Virtual Kit codes today, but FIRST Choice doesn’t open until Wednesday, November 21, so they are not much use till then.

Kit and Kickoffs

The deadline to sign up for kit and kickoff is coming up! Teams must make their selections before 12:00 PM (noon) Eastern Time on Monday, November 19. Teams who do not make their selections will default to having the kit shipped to their location and will incur applicable shipping costs.

To complete this task, please log onto your Dashboard and take the following steps:

• Under the Team Events section, select "Event Options"
• From the drop-down, select "Kit & Kickoff"
• Click on “Yes” to attend a local Kickoff
• Select Kickoff location
• Enter number of attendees
• Click Yes or No if you are picking up your kit at a local Kickoff

Payment

Just a just a friendly reminder that 1^st Regional or District registration fees are due Monday, November 19. See this page for more information.

Special Post-Kickoff Show

After the recent announcement that teams attending the Manchester Kickoff will no longer be allowed on the field to interact with field elements, we heard from several of you with concerns. The greatest concern seemed to be that local teams will no longer be able to take photos and video for sharing with the rest of the community. We have planned ways to ease this concern.

First, we will have two independent sets of field photos available, one courtesy of WPI, one courtesy of NASA. Brad Miller from WPI has been doing this for several years, but the NASA photos from Drew Price and Dave Lavery will be new. The photos are being taken independently. This will increase the chance that something missed by one set will be picked up by the other.

Second, we are going to have an interactive post-Kickoff show on Twitch after the main kickoff broadcast concludes. As well as including the pre-recorded Field Tour Videos we normally would show, we will be taking requests from the community via the Twitch chat to show various field components or interactions. This will not be a time to ask game rules questions, as you should save those for when the Q&A system opens. But this will be a time for any individual signed into Twitch to ask field-related “show me” questions like “can you show game piece X interacting with field component Y.” We think many of these types of questions will be answered by the pre-recorded Field Tour videos, but it’s not possible to anticipate everything the teams would like to see. More details about this show will be posted later.

Frank