FIRST Robotics Competition Blog

With only 49,019 FIRST Robotics Competition team members currently registered this season, we have a long way to go to reach our goal of having at least 85% of FRC team members registered. We need your help to get us there.

Why is this important to FIRST? We are often asked questions from FIRST leadership, sponsors, government officials, school administrators and others such as how many youth does FIRST serve, how many girls participate in FIRST Robotics Competition, how many students are from underrepresented communities, what is the size of a typical team, how many students participate in multiple FIRST programs? The answers to these questions and more are informed by the youth registration system. Only those who register are counted in our summary reports on youth team members. And as a result, we may be overestimating or underestimating the number of youth served, FIRST program history, and the percentage of underserved and underrepresented youth in our programs.

Why is this important for your team members? In addition to our own need to understand who we are serving, registering has benefits to team members. FIRST has recently started communicating with registered FIRST Robotics Competition team members to share news, updates and reminders. Our evaluation team invites team members to answer event and program surveys, providing us with important feedback on the program, and helping us make decisions on what to improve. Keeping in touch after high school is another important reason to register; FIRST Alumni Relations only knows who is an alum if they have registered, and they communicate regularly about continued benefits from FIRST experiences (including scholarship, career and other FIRST Alumni-only opportunities like events and give-aways).

We have recently made improvements to the registration system, including simplifying the flow of registration for students and parents, adding additional help text and FAQ link, and simplifying the invitation process for Mentors by providing last season’s team list to easily invite last year’s team members to the team. We believe the changes make the system easier to use and hope they will encourage teams to complete the registration process.

Mentors - if your youth team members have not yet registered with FIRST, please take a few minutes to invite them to your team (through your team contacts page on the firstinspires.org dashboard).

FIRST Robotics Competition team members – if you have not registered, please use this link to get started.

We have two great resources to help you navigate the process:

• How To: Navigate FIRST Registration System, Adult
• How To: Navigate FIRST Registration System, Student

If you have questions, please contact firsteammembers@firstinspires.org. Thank you!