Inside a Student-Built FIRST Robot: Interactive How It Works

• FIRST Robotics
• robotics
• Dean Kamen
• engineering
• education

Part battle-bot rally, part engineering crash course, FIRST Robotics takes science education out of classrooms and throws it into arenas packed with fans. Each winter, high school teams receive a kit of parts and the rules to a game. (It changes yearly.) Then they have six weeks to build an entry for a rough-and-tumble mechanical melee. Founded in 1989 by prolific inventor Dean Kamen, FIRST now draws on the competitive fire of more than 37,000 students in eight countries. In 2008, a 70-student rookie team from Saunders Trade and Technical High School in Yonkers, N.Y., made it through two regional competitions to the national event with this robot, named Linda (after the school secretary). “FIRST makes engineering something everyone can do,” says Christina Serrano, a 16-year-old Saunders student. Adds teammate Daniel Arroyo, 17, “If you can build a robot, who is to say you can’t do something more one day?”

The January announcement of the game rules officially kicks off the FIRST Robotics season. The object of the 2008 challenge was to score points by manipulating balls around a track. Two alliances of three teams each competed against each other in a match. Some teams designed their robots to be high-scoring shooters, like Saunders’s, while others built theirs to push the ball around the track or block opponents. The 2009 game will present a host of new challenges—and lead to new breeds of bots.

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