FIRSTTM Championship Ignites Students Scientific Savvy with Three Levels of Robotics Challenges, April 16-18, in Atlantas Georgia Dome
Business Wire, April 14, 2009
FIRST Founder and Inventor Dean Kamen Expects Young
Innovators Will Enhance the 21st Century Workforce
MANCHESTER, N.H. — More than 10,000 students from 28 countries and 533 custom-built robots
will swarm Atlantas Georgia Dome, April 16-18, to compete in the FIRSTTM
(For Inspiration and Recognition of Science
and Technology) Championship, and discover the excitement of
science and technology. As students engage in three robotics
competitions under one roof, FIRST Robotics Competition, FIRST
Tech Challenge, and FIRST LEGO League, FIRST
founder Dean Kamen believes the career skills they are developing will
contribute to a brighter economic future.
Today, facing the challenges of our fragile global economy and climate
change, and addressing worldwide public health concerns, we need
innovative thinkers to help solve societys increasingly-complex
problems, said Kamen. Handling robotics challenges and working
alongside professional engineers, FIRST students develop the
skills necessary to be the architects of the solutions we need.
Kamen founded FIRST, a not-for-profit organization, to inspire
young peoples interest and participation in science, technology, and
engineering, and motivate them to pursue career opportunities in these
fields. FIRST students build life and career skills while
building robots that can handle complex tasks during robotics games.
We have 16-year-olds securing patents and 10-year-olds offering advice
on climate change issues to government officials, Kamen continued. I
am encouraged to see so many positive contributions by FIRST
students; each one of them is becoming his/her own economic stimulus
package for the workforce of the future.
FIRST students vied for a spot at this weekends FIRST
Championship by competing in regional FIRST competitions for
several months, displaying sportsmanship and excelling at competitive
play. Along their journey, students learned business and marketing
skills, as they secured sponsors and developed partnerships among
schools, businesses, and communities. Their hard work will culminate in
three levels of robotics competitions during the FIRST
Championship:
FIRST ROBOTICS COMPETITION
The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Championship for high-school
students is now in its 18th and largest-ever season. This
years challenge, LUNACYTM, honors the 40th
anniversary of Apollo 11, when NASA landed a man on the moon.
In the LUNACY game, robots are designed to pick up 9″ game balls and
score them in trailers hitched to their opponents robots for points
during a two- minute and 15-second match. Additional points are awarded
for scoring a special game ball, the Super Cell, in the opponents’
trailers during the last 20 seconds of the match
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