I happened to come across this wild high energy event this weekend. Fueled by passion and pride, teams of high school students from around the world gathered in Berkeley, California from April 4- 7 to compete against each other in another round of the East Bay Regional FIRST® Robotics Competition. “Dubbed a varsity Sport for the Mind,™” FIRST® Robotics Competition (FRC) combines the excitement of sport with the rigors of science and technology. This team based program is life-changing, career-molding and a lot of fun.
Ironically I discovered afterwards that my dentist participated in one of these events when he attended high school on the east coast. He was jazzed to hear that I went to check out the East Bay Regional FIRST® and that it happened here in the San Francisco Bay Area. He went on and on about how it was so inspiring and how his team built and wrote code for the robots. He enumerated how they start out with a basic kit of parts, mostly just a drive base and then they have to construct or find the parts for the rest of the robot. “It was not just that you opened a box and put it together.” Each year the ”game” that robots play in the competition changes and the challenge is for students to think like engineers. Teams under the guidance of mentors design, build, and code robots to compete in an alliance format against other teams. Robots are built from a reusable platform, powered by Android technology, and can be coded using a variety of levels of Java-based programming.1
At the FIRST competition site at Berkeley High School I had a chance to chat with Luann Heimlich, the FIRST Senior Regional Director of Northern California and the Bay Area. Heimlich pointed out “Even though this is a regional competition, we invite teams from around the world, and there are five teams Türkiye, one from India, and one from Australia here today.”
I also had an opportunity to speak with some of the young competitors who were excited to talk about their robots while they were preparing for the next round of competition.
Luann informed me that “FIRST® was started in 1989. This particular competition starts in January every year where the students are given a challenge and what the game is going to be, then they have to design and build their robots. It is all high school kids doing this with mentors from professional communities from around the Bay Area and around the world. The winners here today will qualify for the world championship which is happening in Houston [Texas] in two weeks.”
“Most of these teams are operating as small businesses,so they are doing marketing plans, business plans, strategic plans, they are doing fundraising and seeking sponsors.”
Luann emphasized, “We have 30% of our participants that are women and every event we run we have a special women in STEM event. Last week we were down in Monterey [California] and we had the highest ranking female engineer from Apple there to speak to the girls and get them excited. We spend a lot of time being inclusive and that women are valued and get more girls involved.”
The East Bay Regional is a high-energy, high-tech sporting event where teams, professionals and young people together solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way. https://cafirst.org/frc/east-bay-regional/
48% of female FIRST alumni declare a major in engineering or computer science by their fourth year of college (compared to 16% of peers in FIRST Longitudinal Study)
According to info at the FIRST® website, “Under strict rules, limited resources and time constraints, teams of high school students raise funds, design a team “brand,” hone teamwork skills, build and program a robot to compete. It’s as close to “real world” engineering as a student can get.” FIRST® is the brainstorm of inventor Dean Kamen who founded this global nonprofit organization to help prepare young people for the future through a suite of life-changing youth robotics programs that build skills, confidence, and resilience.”
FIRST® is the world’s leading youth-serving nonprofit advancing STEM education. https://www.firstinspires.org/about/at-a-glance