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FIRST Robotics Championship Underway
Bob Moretti writes "The annual FIRST robotics championship is underway at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. 295 of the best high school teams from North America and beyond have brought close to 20,000 students. 130 pound, 5 foot tall robots compete for pride and national recognition. NASA is providing a webcast. An explanation of the somewhat complicated rules can be found here. Any event that puts science and engineering in the spotlight for thousands of high school kids, many of them from low income or inner city areas, is a must-see. <shameless promotion> My team is currently in 20th place in the Galileo division. </shameless promotion>"
How about a link that works
My School, WEttown School, a large Private school in East PA is there too. They are the team that one the "Best Rookie Team" Award at the Anapolis Reagionals and placed 15th there too! WE are all really syked about their success.
Try the following places also, Acroname and Mondotronics Robot Store
David Culp
Coach of the 2004 Oklahoma Regional Botball (http://www.botball.org) Champions (1st and 2nd place teams actually).
My high school participates in BEST (specifically, the San Antonio hub), which seems to be similar-- except FIRST actually seems to involve some programming (BEST robots are basically controlled not unlike how an RC car would be controlled).
Nonetheless, these programs are a great way to teach hands-on engineering to students.
A machine actually built by students in their school doesn't stand a chance
Not true at all. Last year, my team, 212, had no corporate sponsorship, no engineers, no nothing: we built our robot in our school's machine shop with help from parents. Students had to pay their own food and lodging. None of that takes away from all of the knowledge, experience, teamwork, and of course, gracious professionalism that you learn from competing.
And oh yea, as for standing no chace...we won first place at the Central Florida Regional last year.
Definately a cool program. I was involved in it 2 years ago, my team (643) won the Virginia regional and got 2nd in the Philadelphia regional. We also were in the championship tournament at Disney. For about all of January and Feburary (each year's challange is released near the turn of the year) the team worked on designing and building the robot and soliciting funds for hours each day. The championship was great, the school even gave us spending money and FIRST gave us vouchers for meals and tickets to the park. They even rented out Epcot for one night (and they took up half the parking lot for the whole week). Of course Dean Kamen was their with his Segway. It was certainly a great experiance and well worth it. Despite pressure from the school Administration and students, the tech. teachers didn't do it this year or last year, it was too much of a time commitment and they have families (I doubt their wives would have let them).
Sadly, there's a lot of truth to this.
I've been involved on the periphery of a not-so-local high school's (Rick Hansen Secondary School - Team 1241 "Force 6") development project and I'm disappointed in the extremely high cost of entry (ie to be registered and to get a kit), the sophistication of the projects as well as the other costs associated with it. It is essentially impossible to field a team for less than $35k CAN ($25k+ USD) to be successful. This includes money for the kits as well as travel expenses and, amazingly enough, promotional materials that are needed to ask for sponsorship funds.
The high cost of entry really bars schools from low-income inner city neighborhoods, which are the ones that would probably benefit the most from the experience. These schools also do not have contacts/parents in industry that could help as mentors and sponsors. This is probably the biggest issue I have with USFIRST right now.
The robot task is such that high school kids cannot work through them without substantial help from experienced engineers and what the kinds get out of the program (as well as put into it) depends primarily on how the sponsor engineers allow the kids to do. The best sponsors are high level advisors and make sure the kids plan out the designs themselves and help them think through the problems that they encounter rather than do the design themselves. I'm sure there are a lot of cases where the kids are barely able to play around with the robots before the competition because of the amount of time the sponsors put into the robots.
There is too much emphasis on the necessary fund raising. The Rick Hansen team had created a promotional DVD along with glossy brochures; there is an irony that these materials can be produced quite cheaply because they give the impression that the team has more money than they know what to do with.
Rather than limiting the kids to the materials supplied in the (incredibly expensive) kits, I would prefer seeing something where the bare minimum was provided by FIRST and the majority of parts were to be found at Home Depot/Digikey by the kids themselves. I think this would limit the price somewhat, would allow the kids to spend more time on design, building and experimenting (which is what FIRST should be all about anyway).
There should also be a restriction on how much the sponsors can do - clearly there are a lot of teams that benefit from corporate tool rooms with trained tool makers and do not rely on industrial arts rooms with the students learning how to machine parts on their own. To help enforce this, I believe that each team, to qualify must provide documentation on the robot to prove that the students were primarily responsible for the design and this documentation could be made available by USFIRST as guides for later teams.
Regardless of the warts, USFIRST is the best opportunity kids have to learn, design and compete with others. The events are amazing, fun and energetic experiences that are barely controlled chaos. The kids have a lot of fun, FIRST is a great way to build school spirit and it gives a few kids an opportunity to see if engineering/computer science is the way they want to go in life.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Hardly a scam - there's a continuum of how teams arrange things - and spread the work among students, teachers, parents, engineers. Our first year was probably 1/4 each - with the slight hobble that to actually work in the corporate sponsor's machine shop - you had to be 18 for liability reasons. So we came up with a solution - certain fabs got done in the shop, the rest of it at school. Parents brought in tools, jigs, supplies, the kids designed with straws and pins if they had to (ironically, that was the same propotyping that the engineers used when we first visited their plant - independently they came out from the shop with a chassis model of straws and straight pins. The kids were pretty jazzed.
Do some places do it the way you cited? Sure. It's allowed, but hardly encvouraged. The teams with the most pride are high student involvement - it's an end to end solution - engineering, logistics, economics, promotion - in short, all the skills need ed to run a real engineering venture.
Remember, only students can operate the robot, so there has to be very tight integration between design, build, software, and operators.
As first year players, with the spread out approach to the work, we placed 5th in our region, somewhere in the 20s nationally. Not shabby.
Could we have sat back and let the engineers do everything? We could try but the students never would have let them.
In that first year, we got back from the regionals, and someone back at school asked me how it was. I told them it was the first time in 17 years of teaching that I had to sit down and put my head between my knees because I was about to pass out watching my students do something academic.
Very cool. I've got five former students from that first batch that are in engineering schools now - FIRST fanned the fire in them. I saw kids solve problems I never would have though to throwing at them otherwise. Real pressure, real deadlines, real issues, real engineering.
To almost a man/woman - the engineers I've seen go thru this breathlessly exclaim that they now remember why they got into engineering in the first place - new challenges, novel solutions, the thrill of discovery - compared to many engineering jobs where they're doing the next miniscule iteration of the same thing they did the past half decade or more...
As a team coordinator, I did the behind the scenes, logistics, personalities, money, random headaches, travel, herding kids at WDW, airlines, schedules, parents, etc. You know - the fun stuff - and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I'm as proiud of those teams as anything I've seen in education.
Your mileage may vary.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Did you go out looking for sponsors? Did you learn anything from the engineers that helped you? Did you have any engineers helping you? How much building did YOU actually do?
FIRST isn't about students building a robot. If you want to do that, go build one for Robot Wars or BattleBots. If you don't want to build a robot, look into the Odyssey of the Mind competition.
FIRST is about marketing your team to get sponsorship. It's about getting community involvement in order to find engineers to help you and for people to help with logistics (shipping, travel, cheering section, etc). It's about LEARNING from those engineers. The robots just give you something technical to do to reach a goal: the competition. And there is supposed to be a website to get news out to the community, and there is an animated video you are to submit as part of the competition. It's not just a robot. Note that Odyssey of the mind is about a lot of the same stuff, too.
I have been a volunteer for both the Odyssey of the Mind and FIRST robotics competitions (Northern VA and Chesapeake Regional, respectively). I WISH I had the opportunity these students have when I was in school. I had LEGO's, Erector sets (no, not erection sets!), etc. and I had to build things on my own to learn the mechanics. The engineers involved on the FIRST teams are industry professionals. It would have been a great head start if I had learned the way things really are from a professional before I went to college.
If you didn't get professionals to help you, and you didn't get sponsors to give you free space to build your robot, or sponsors to donate time in a machine shop for your team, then you either didn't try hard enough, or you and your teacher/mentor didn't understand the game.
My school competed in this last year...
We are an inner-city public school. We had no sponsor, couldn't cough up the $20000 entry fee (or whatever it was), and made our robot for under $200. They waived the entry for our aptly titled "ghetto bot". When wer got there, the number of student built robots were slim to none. Most realyl are built by the engineers that sponsored the school.
We didnt get last though, so i guess thats good.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
1. The robots are not autonomous. They're little more than big RC cars. No AI, no computer vision, frankly little computer stuff at all. If you're student interested in CS, this competition has little to offer you.
... make their *own* "LegoLeague". Basically a heavily dumbed-down version of BotBall. So rather than work with BotBall, they're trying to run them out of business it looks to me.
2. The cost is daunting. A typical budget for a FIRST team is about $15K. This basically means that FIRST is a competition only for kids from affluent suburban high schools. If you're an inner-city school, unless you're lucky enough to get a grant, you're not good enough for this competition.
3. FIRST often arranges for grants by teaming schools with corporate sponsors. The sponsors provide in-kind cash and some mentoring. But my experience is that sponsors, being corporations, rationally want to make sure that their "donations" maximize their own visibility, and so when the kids' efforts go south, the corporations wind up doing much, even most, of the work on the robots, particularly in inner-city or otherwise disadvantaged schools with less resources. In some cases kids have been reduced to being, more or less, the joystick operators.
4. FIRST doesn't play ball nicely with other, frankly rather better, competitions. For example, BotBall (www.kipr.org) has been around for a long time, and kids have a month or two to build an autonomous robot to solve a complex task using lego. Thus this incorporates EE, CS, and ME aspects of robotics. The cost of materials is usually about $1K. Recognizing that their $15K entry made FIRST only available for the Mercedes Benz class schools, they looked to BotBall for some inspiration and decided to
I do not get a good feeling about FIRST in the least.
Wow... This article provides great evidence how many /.ers are teenagers :)
My rookie team placed 15th out of 52 teams in the Granite State Regional. We were a student team, with a couple of mechanical engineers who volunteered their time but not much money. We even beat our mentors!
</plug type="shameless">
Actually, it's the first fifteen seconds that are autonomous. Trust me...I'm the programmer for 818. I know this one. :)
Goo goo g'joob.
It is rather disturbing how many people are bashing the program. It is a good chance for students to learn about many things they otherwise wouldn't in high school. The students on the team I help mentor (1243 out of Swartz Creek, MI) did all the pnuematics and all the electrical systems. We also have students learning how to program in C, doing all the autonomous code and writing code to handle inputs from the various controls. All the mentors did was explain to them how the systems worked, they hooked it up, they figured out problems, and they built the robot.
We are a rookie team this year, took first at the Grand Rapids regional, and are currently competing at the championship (17th place in the Curie division, currently). Sadly, I am not there.