Oh, man.

It’s like you walk into the kitchen, and someone has a big ol’ pot of chili cooking, not quite ready, but almost. One whiff and you can say hasta mañana to any free will you thought you had. Of their own volition, your legs walk themselves over, bringing along, just for the ride, your now-useless grey matter and anything else that happens to be attached. 

Today we wanted to remind you about some features and functionality of the FRC Events website and API. At all official events, the Field Management System (FMS) sends data about the event to FIRST’s servers in real-time and we make that data available on both our webpages and our API. 

6,000+ Teams of Students Tackle New Adventure-Themed Challenge During 2017-18 Season

Hi FRC Teams and Volunteers,

By now, many of you have read my last blog about the updates to our Volunteer roles. Here’s a little more information about why, and how, we added some of these important age requirements!

A teaser for the 2018 FIRST Robotics Competition, you shall have. If things go as planned, we’ll be releasing it broadly at 8 PM Eastern Time on Thursday, September 14^th, on YouTube, FaceBook, and Twitter, at a minimum. If things don’t go as planned, you will hear about it. Then we’ll hear about it.

The Volunteer Resources Department has been hard at work this summer improving many resources to enhance our volunteer’s experience with FIRST. At the Championship events, we held feedback sessions with our volunteers to find out how FIRST could improve and one of the things we kept hearing was that the volunteer roles did not accurately represent what the responsibilities were.

We caught up with FIRST Alum Betsy Soukup from Team StuyPulse #694, from Stuyvesant High School in New York, who is now working at SpaceX in California.

We’ve answered a few more questions that have popped up in response to our blog announcing the move to a preference system for event assignment. We also added detail to one of the original answers that was incomplete. You can find this information in an FAQ document posted here.

The following article was originally published by the IEEE Computer Society in the July 2017 issue of Computer magazine as part of a special issue on challenge-based learning.

Preparing a 21st century workforce requires educators to actively engage students to become critical thinkers and active learners through challenging-based learning. FIRST engages students to work in teams with industry professionals and accomplish a specific science-based or engineering challenge through the exploration of multiple technologies and methodologies, including programming languages, computer-aided design, mechanics, electronics, and internet research.

You will need pool noodles to construct robot bumpers for the 2018 game. Among other things, this enhances the buoyancy of your robot.*