As the school year gets going, athletes start training rigorously for the upcoming season. But while they are running, rowing and swimming, other students are riveting pieces of aluminum together, wiring circuits and writing pages of code in C++. These are participants in the FIRST Robotics Competition.

FIRST (which stands for For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is an organization which strives to increase the support of engineering in schools and in our culture. The FIRST Robotics competition is its high school level program, which in 2012 drew 54,000 students from 2,700 teams in all 50 states and over 60 countries. Despite this wide presence, FIRST still hasn’t achieved their goal of becoming a household name. “I had never heard of FIRST,” says David Earle, a participant. “My mom heard about it somewhere.”

The FIRST season starts in January each year, when the rules of the year’s game are revealed, and ends with the world championship in April. During this time, high school students must design, draft, build, and program a fully functioning robot to play that year’s unique game.  According to Earle, “you can get really involved … the more you put into it, the more you get out of it.” The games are all played between alliances of three robots, and they all feature multi-faceted gameplay and scoring systems that allow for many different strategies.

There are three FIRST teams in Ann Arbor: Team 1076, the PiHi Samurai; Team 3322, the Eagle Imperium; and Team 830, the Rat Pack. Team 1076 is primarily associated with Pioneer High School, and Team 3322 with Skyline; Team 830 was originally associated with Huron High School, but has since come to include students from most of Ann Arbor’s high schools. Ann Arbor teams benefit from the sponsorship of Maker Works, a community workshop that allows them access to the tools and machinery required to build a robot. Team 830 was one of three teams to win the Michigan state championships last year, acknowledged by FIRST founder Dean Kamen to be the most competitive FIRST event in the world. Teams 3322 and 830 both qualified for the world championships in St. Louis, Missouri.

FIRST strongly encourages teams to work together, as part of their philosophy of “coopertition,” which their website defines as “the concept and a philosophy that teams can and should help and cooperate with each other even as they compete.” At competitions, teams routinely loan each other tools and parts and demonstrate their ideas to others. In Earle’s words,  “my favorite part [of FIRST] … is seeing other teams’ thought processes, how they look at the problems.” Every game since 2000 has had scoring partially dependent on working together with the opposing alliance.

During the off-season, teams compete in unofficial competitions, work on side-projects, and try to attract publicity (and corporate sponsorship).

The summer is an important opportunity for team members to gain experience, especially as older participants graduate and leave the team. Although Team 830 lost several of their skilled members since last year, Earle is optimistic for the next season: “We learned a lot over the summer. I think we’re ready for next year.”