It's hard to describe what tomorrow means to people involved in FIRST Robotics Competition. Tomorrow is the official kick off to the new season, and this means many things.
It means that if you are involved in FIRST the next 6 weeks of your life will be among the busiest you'll have. Each team has the same 6 weeks to design, build, test and program a robot, which as of today we still don't know what the robot is supposed to do.
Kick off also means that we learn the new game. This is important and it is sometimes a hard thing to describe to people that do not know about FIRST. Imagine if you went into a high school and selected the 30 best athletes. You had all of September, October, November and December to train. It would not be till the beginning of January that the sport (or combination of sports) would be announced, then they'd have 6 weeks to perfect their moves and plays.
I'm sure everyone knows some high school somewhere that takes football a little too seriously; the athletes on the team do almost anything to win, sometimes the coaches too. They do this because it has a lot of meaning to them and it is something that they want to be proud of.
The students that participate on FIRST teams have this same sort of drive to compete and win, although FIRST makes sure to inject a healthy dose of Gracious Professionalism into every student, teacher, mentor and parent. This means that teams do their best to win, but it MUST be fairly. In fact when teams are working on their machines before a competition, teams will often help other teams, even if they know they are going to be opponents in an upcoming match.
There is an atmosphere about FIRST that I've never seen anywhere, and I know the world would be a better place if all of our leaders held these same values.
Back to Kick Off - it starts tomorrow morning, and if you're interested you can watch the same live feed that we will be watching. It will be broadcast online at this website:
http://robotics.nasa.gov/events/2009_frcwebcasts.php
The web cast starts tomorrow (Saturday January 3) at 10:00 am EST.
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