FIRST Robotics Competition Blog

 

 

Resources

We know many teams are recruiting and training new students this time of year. With that in mind, we wanted to share some new resources that have been created as well as remind everyone of some existing resources we have available.

Let’s start with some of the fun new resources that we have available for teams this season:

• Updated Mentor Guide - We have updated and rebranded our “Guide to Running a FIRST^® Robotics Competition Team” to the FIRST Robotics Competition Mentor Guide. This guide is intended to help teams with best practices for running their FIRST Robotics Competition team and is a great resource for both rookie and veteran teams. We highly recommend this resource for all mentors!
• Build Season Timeline: We took the high-level Build Season Timeline from the Mentor Guide and created PDF files to allow teams to take the timeline, print it, and post in their shop. The Build Season Timelines can be found under Team Organization on the Team Management webpage. If the original timeline we created is not quite how your team is organized, no worries, we also added the Excel template to allow teams to customize before printing for their shop.

 

 

• Mental Health Resources – This document covers some tips to help ensure your FIRST Robotics Competition team has a healthy and supportive environment for teens and mentors during the build and competition season.
• Scouting resources – We worked with FIRST Robotics Competition Team, 1678 – Citrus Circuits, to create two scouting resources:
  • Introduction to Scouting - This guide is intended to be an introduction to scouting and cover scouting basics.
  • Intermediate Scouting - This guide is intended to be an intermediate overview of scouting. This guide covers how to visualize data (spreadsheets and Tableau), Computed fields, Subjective Scouting, initial statistics of scouting, and scouting for match strategy.
• Kickoff Worksheet – This Kickoff Worksheet helps teams identify important rules and strategies for each season's game. A huge shoutout to FIRST Robotics Competition Team, 2791 – Shaker Robotics, for putting this worksheet together and for allowing FIRST^® to edit and update the guide.
• Computer Requirements: This Computer Requirements Document serves as a recommendation for the hardware and operating system requirements for the computer system needed for each FIRST program.
• The Compass Alliance (TCA) Worksheets – The Compass Alliance is made up of a group of teams from around the world. Their goal is to help support teams with resources produced by the veteran teams. A few years ago, they reached out to FIRST with an idea to create a series of worksheets. These worksheets are intended to help teams with various aspects of FIRST. They do not tell teams exactly how to do things but instead have questions and resources to help guide teams to learn and make decisions for themselves on how to do everything. The first batch has been released on both the Technical Resources and Team Management webpages. They have worksheets on everything from the Dean’s List Award, to how to set up the Pit, to Prototyping and everything in between!

 

There are many more resources available on both the Technical Resources and Team Management webpages. We have previously blogged about some of these, but I want to call out that we have resources on everything from recruitment to fundraising to bumper construction to electrical to CAD, and more!

We know that these resources are just a start to what teams are looking for. If you know of additional resources that exist or have ideas on resources that you think would help teams, please reach out to frcteamadvocate@firstinspires.org. Additionally, if you are interested in helping us to produce additional resources, please reach out. We know our community is full of amazingly talented people and we would love the help of our community to make FIRST Robotics Competition more accessible to all teams.

 

KitBot

While we’re not ready to share any of the new KitBot resources quite yet, we did want to call out that we have created a new webpage to host the KitBot Resources all in one place. Closer to Kickoff, we’ll release the shopping list and on Kickoff, and this webpage will be updated with all of the resources we previously mentioned!

 

Volunteer Registration

Finally, I am happy to share that Volunteer Registration is now open for all FIRST Robotics Competition Events, including FIRST Championship!  We’d love your help! Want to know how to register as a volunteer? Take a look at this Volunteer Registration System Instructions.