About the FIRST Organization

View Image (901KB)

The FIRST Robotics Competition is an exciting, multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way. The program is a life-changing, career-molding experience – and a lot of fun. In 2005, the competition reached more than 20,000 students on over 900 teams in 27 competitions. Our teams come from Canada, Brazil, Great Britain, and almost every U.S states. The competitions are high-tech spectator sporting events, the result of lots of focused brainstorming, real-world teamwork, dedicated mentoring, project timelines, and deadlines.

FIRST is a wise investment for corporate America because its main mission is to form tomorrow's bright scientists, engineers and leaders. The individual participants, the community and the nation benefit from participating in the most prestigious engineering competition in the country. As it was reported in a front page article of the New York Times on May 3, 2004, “The United States has started to lose its worldwide dominance in areas of science and innovation as foreign advances in basic science now often rival or even exceed America's, apparently with little public awareness of trend or its implications for jobs, industry, national security, or the vigor of the nation's intellectual and cultural. Today is imperative to offer our students opportunities to excel in the critical areas of science and technology.

We are committed to provide an environment in which team members can apply mathematics and physics to solve real life problems. Without sponsors our successes will be limited. We need help from corporations to make possible the advancement in the science and technology areas in our community. Your participation in our project is important and we certainly will acknowledge your generosity in many forms.”

Colleges, universities, corporations, businesses, and individuals provide scholarships to our participants. Involved engineers experience again many of the reasons why they chose engineering a as profession and the companies they work for contribute to the community while they prepare and create their future workforce. The competition shows students that the technological fields hold many opportunities and that the basic concepts of science, math, engineering, and invention are exciting and interesting.

© FIRST