The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is an international high school robotics competition. Each year, teams made up of high school students, coaches, and mentors have a six-week period to build their robot to compete in that year's game.  To play the given year's game, Robots must complete tasks like scoring balls into goals, placing inner tubes onto racks, hanging on bars, and balancing robots on balance beams.  The robots can weight in at over 150 pounds.  The game, along with the required set of tasks, changes annually.  Every January, the teams find out what the game will be during a global kickoff event.  At kickoff, the game is revealed and teams are given a small kit of basic parts.  From that kit, teams design, build and purchase more parts and components to build their final robot.  To pay for these parts and components, teams raise funds and seek sponsors.  The FIRST Robotics Competition is one of four robotics competition programs organized by FIRST, the other three being FIRST Lego League Explore, FIRST Lego League Challenge, and the FIRST Tech Challenge.


"Gracious Professionalism" and "Coopertition" are the two values FRC is built around.  "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.

Infinite Recharge was the game from the 2020 season.  The season included a partnership with Lucasfilm as part of its Star Wars: Force for Change initiative.  The Infinite Recharge game involves each team controlling a robot and performing specific tasks on a field to score points. The game centers around a futuristic city theme involving two alliances consisting of three teams each competing to perform various tasks, including shooting foam balls known as Power Cells into high and low goals to activate a Shield Generator, manipulating a Control Panel to activate this shield, and returning to the Shield Generator to park or climb at the end of the match. The objective is to energize and activate the shield before the match ends and asteroids strike FIRST City, a futuristic city modeled after Star Wars.  

The 2020 season was suspended on March 12, 2020 and all remaining events were cancelled on May 13, 2020 due to the COVID-19.  The 2021 season was the first season in history to begin with no events scheduled, with teams instead taking part in three virtual challenges that  included judged awards.

2022 Season has already started with FIRST teasing the theme for the season for all four of the programs.  The theme is transportation.  FIRST® FORWARDS presented by Qualcomm, teams have the power to reimagine a path forward and invent the future of transportation.  The FRC game is called Rapid React and will be presented by Boeing.

 

There are 3 FIRST Robotics teams in the FM Area.