Community Resources for Teams
Jan 19, 2023 Written by Collin Fultz, FIRST Robotics Competition Senior Program Director
The strength of FIRST® lies within our community, a global network of coaches, mentors, participants, sponsors, volunteers, and alumni committed to our mission.
One of the ways our community shows its strength is in the resources created each season to help teams tackle new challenges presented in each year’s game. We’re highlighting a few of these resources to help spread their awareness throughout more of the FIRST community.
DISCLAIMER: These are all unofficial, community-driven resources. The strategies and designs have not been verified to be legal or effective in playing CHARGED UPSM presented by Haas. It’s up to each team to ensure that the robot they bring to competition is legal per that season’s robot rules.
Robot in 3 Days
Robot in 3 Days is an activity where groups form to try to build a robot that could compete in each year’s game in the first 72 hours after Kickoff. The groups have done a great job documenting their ideas, processes, successes, and failures to help teams through the first part of build season.
You can find more by searching for “Robot in 3 days” online. Two examples are Robot in 3 Days and those found on the First Updates Now YouTube channels.
Open Alliance
From their website, “The Open Alliance is a group of teams that openly share designs, code, and processes. The goal of The Open Alliance is to foster a culture of collaboration and innovation within FIRST.” There are 55 teams (wow!) participating in The Open Alliance this year, all willing to share their build season with their fellow competitors.
Everybot
Everybot is created each season by FIRST® Robotics Competition Team 118, the Robonauts from Texas. From the Everybot site, Everybot “is an affordable, competitive, and elegant robot intended to play the FIRST Robotics Competition challenge. Everybot can be built with nothing but basic tools and items found in either the kit of parts or purchased from your local hardware store…”
FIRST in Michigan has created these resource videos as a supplement to the resources provided by Team 118.
A huge “thank you” to everyone in the FIRST community for creating these resources and making FIRST more accessible to more youth!