FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is an international high school robotics competition. Each year, teams of high school students, coaches, and mentors work during a six-week period to build robots capable of competing in that year's game that weigh up to . Robots complete tasks such as scoring balls into goals, placing inner tubes onto racks, hanging on bars, and balancing robots on balance beams. The game, along with the required set of tasks, changes annually. While teams are given a kit of a standard set of parts during the annual Kickoff, they are also allowed and encouraged to buy or fabricate specialized parts. FIRST Robotics Competition is one of five robotics competition programs organized by FIRST, the other four being FIRST LEGO League Discover, FIRST LEGO League Explore, FIRST LEGO League Challenge, and FIRST Tech Challenge.
The culture of FIRST Robotics Competition is built around two values. "Gracious Professionalism" embraces the competition inherent in the program but rejects trash talk and chest-thumping, instead embracing empathy and respect for other teams. "Coopertition" emphasizes that teams can cooperate and compete at the same time. The goal of the program is to inspire students to be science and technology leaders.
2022 was the 31st year of the competition. 3,225 teams, including more than 80,000 students and 25,000 mentors from 26 countries, built robots. The 2022 season included 58 Regional Competitions, 90 District Qualifying Competitions, and 11 District Championships. In 2022, over 450 teams won slots to attend the FIRST Championship event, where they competed in a tournament. In addition to on-field competition, teams and team members competed for awards recognizing entrepreneurship, creativity, engineering, industrial design, safety, controls, media, quality, and exemplifying the core values of the program. As a result of COVID-19, the amount of active teams decreased during the 2021 season; however, numbers began to increase during the 2022 season.
Most teams reside in the United States, with Canada, Turkey, Mexico, Israel, China, and Australia contributing significant numbers of teams.
History
FIRST was founded in 1989 by inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen, with inspiration and assistance from physicist and MIT professor emeritus Woodie Flowers. Kamen was disappointed with the number of kids—particularly women and minorities—who did not consider science and technology careers and decided to do something about it. As an inventor, he looked for activities that captured the enthusiasm of students and decided that combining the excitement of sports competition with science and technology had the potential to inspire students.
Distilling what sports had done right into a recipe for engaging young people, Kamen says, turned out to be relatively straightforward. "It's after school, not in school. It's aspirational, not required," he explained to me.
"You don't get quizzes and tests, you go into competitions and get trophies and letters. You don't have teachers, you have coaches. You nurture, you don't judge. You create teamwork between all the participants. We justify sports for teamwork but why, when we do it in the classroom, do we call it cheating?"
Most of all, it was a nonjudgmental space, where in contrast science and math in traditional educational settings had been soured with embarrassment and uncertainty.
Kamen has stated that FIRST is the invention he feels most proud of and predicts that participants will be responsible for significant technological advances in years to come. The first FIRST Robotics Competition season was in 1992 and had one event at a high school gymnasium in New Hampshire. That first competition was relatively small-scale, similar in size to today's FIRST Tech Challenge and Vex Robotics Competition games. Robots relied on a wired connection to receive data from drivers; in the following year, it quickly transitioned to a wireless system.
Teams
3,225 teams from 26 countries competed in 2022 Rapid React. Of these, 2,859 are "veteran teams" (meaning they have competed in a previous season), and 176 are "rookie teams" (meaning that 2022 was their first season of competition).
The countries represented are listed below: (in decreasing order of number of teams as of 2022)
