FIRST Robotics Competition Blog

Off-Season HYPE! End-of-Season Celebration HYPE! First 2021 Game Play HYPE!

Apr 29, 2021 Written by Frank Merrick, Director FIRST Robotics Competition

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Off-Season Events Are Back, Baby

I hope everyone saw the announcement FIRST made on the Inspire Blog announcing the return of off-season events starting July 1. This is so exciting! There will be some new requirements for off-season events, and we still have many details to work out, but we will have all the information available not later than May 28. I hope we’ll be able to have it earlier than that, but we wanted to give ourselves some breathing room so we could better ensure we’d be able to make our commitment.

I’m so excited that, with luck, and appropriate safety measures in place, many of our teams will be able to experience in-person play this year.


End-of-Season Celebrations

Mark those calendars! In addition to your local award shows coming up, we’ve got not one, but two celebrations being broadcast from FIRST Manchester!

On May 22 at 12 pm noon Eastern Time on FIRSTtv on Twitch, we will be holding an awards show to announce the 20 Game Design Challenge Finalists and reveal their game design concepts. During that show, we’ll also celebrate the 20 Finalists for the FIRST Innovation Challenge presented by Qualcomm.  These finalists will already know who they are by that time as they have some work to do to prepare for final judging, but we wanted to make sure to call them out! In addition, we’ll show some INFINITE RECHARGESM at Home Skills Competition teams and have some other fun things going on during the show.

Our second celebration is on Saturday, June 26, 2021, at 12 pm noon Eastern Time on FIRSTtv. During this broadcast, we’ll reveal the 2021 Dean’s List Award Winners, 2021 Volunteers of the Year, 2021 Woodie Flowers Award, the Game Design Challenge Winners, and the Championship level Chairman’s Award Winners and Finalists. What a great way to celebrate the official season and bring it to a close!


First 2021 Game Play

Hey, remember FIRST Robotics Competition Kickoff way back on January 9?* We released the At Home Challenges but also an updated game designed for in-person play ‘just in case.’ Well ‘just in case’ happened! And this weekend Australia will be putting on an unofficial event using the 2021 game. You can find the rules for the 2021 game on the season materials page under ‘Game Manual.’

You can watch the event on this Twitch channel. Qualification Matches are currently scheduled for Saturday, May 1, 2 - 5 pm AEST and Sunday, May 2, 9 am - 12 pm AEST, and Playoff Matches are scheduled later that same day at 1:30 pm to 3:30 pm AEST. And great news, they are having another event the following weekend, May 8-9! Same times, same channel. Though times are subject to change of course! It’s going to be wicked awesome!**

We have some other unofficial events around the world coming up also, we’ll let you know about those when we get closer.

So much good news in one blog, I love it!

Frank

*I do. First Kickoff for me in years I spent at home in my jammies.
** The phrase ‘wicked awesome’ is best experienced by saying it out loud in a Boston, Massachusetts accent.

 

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