SAWE  went to the FIRST (FRC) is an organization that challenges high school students in science and  competition.  The students have a robotics game “challenge” and then compete against other student teams.  The mission for First FRC is:

“Our mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.”

This year’s game is called Ultimate Ascent and involves Frisbees.  Here is the game animation which describes the game and general rules.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa5MGEZNrf0&list=PLZT9pIgNOV6Ya-bFLZiwVFX8biV6qgUQu&index=10

The Seattle Regional is Mar 28-30 at Century Link Events Center, downtown. Thursday is usually pit work, prep, and practice, Friday are Prelim rounds and Sat finishes the Prelims and Finals.

http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/regional-events?id=430

FIRST FRC competitions involve 3 on 3 alliances.  The Prelim rounds are effectively randomly selected 3 on 3 round robins to determine a ranking.  For the finals, the top 8 ranked teams are alliance captains which choose two other alliance partners that play in a bracket competition until a winner is crowned.   The cool thing about these robots is that these High School kids had 6 weeks since the game is announced (in a worldwide webcast) to design, build, and program their robots.  After 6 weeks, they robots are “quarantined” until competitions.  Team will not be able to work on their competition robots until they arrive at their pits at the Regional Competition site.

These competitions are like NASCAR events with fancy pits, high tech travelling workshops and scouting to feel out the competition and prospective alliances.  I bet if you think you’ll only show up for 2 hours, you’ll end up staying until the end.

Bill Campisteguy (manager BCA Weights) is involved with  Aviation High School Skunkworks Robotics Team 1983.  Check them out at http://ahsrobotics.us/Home/index.html and http://www.youtube.com/user/skunkworksfrc1983

It was a small SAWE turnout, but well worth the time.  We will do this again next year.