FIRST Competitions

After six weeks of the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into the fabrication of the robot, here is where it all pays off. The competitions run from early to late March each year, with the FIRST Championships in April. On the playing field, you are out to win, but gracious professionally. Off the field, you cooperate with the other teams. FIRST does not have long-standing rivalries like other sports, as a team may be your partner one match, but your opponent the next. And that is what gracious professionalism is. Learning to compete, but not violently, but then cooperate the rest of the time, to openly share ideas and concepts, to synergize together. This may should new and unique to rookies and newcomers, but this is what will fuel the industry of the future, competing while cooperating in an open and friendly environment.

FIRST World Championship Event (2006)

It happens to the best of is: sometimes we have a competition in which it seems like everything than can go wrong does. On the playing field, our team barely won any matches. The drive train on our robot needed constant attention, and yet it continued to keep "dropping" chains, rendering it a sitting paperweight. Our elevator, although refined, jammed on several occasions, leaving us not being able to score anything. On the whole, it was generally very stressful and hectic in the pits.

But even though our performance on the playing field was less than stellar, this is where the real inspiration from FIRST comes from. After going out on the playing field, giving it your all, and still not being able to win, things seemed hopeless. But during our last match when such aggressive defense was played on our robot than broke, bent, and more or less destroyed most of our robot, we were determined that our robot would have to be rebuilt to continue competing for the rest of the season.

And so we did just that; we completely rebuilt out robot from the ground up following the Championship event. At our final two competitions of the year: our robot performance not only improved in all aspects of the game, but our spirit and enthusiasm were still just as strong as ever.

‹‹ Go back to the 2006 FIRST Competitions page.