Competition events are, in the words of our teams, “full of passion, excitement, joy, and sorrow…the thrill of success and the agony of defeat.” The FIRST Robotics Competition has grown to 33 regional events and the Championship.

I was amazed at how much interest in engineering and science FIRST generated. A lot of students were inspired to look at area of education that they had never ever thought about before.

One of the things I noticed this year was that the number of girls involved in FIRST continues to climb. At the Boston event three of the 44 teams were all girls. All of the teams seemed to have significant numbers of girls. People at FIRST say that there are upwards of 30% girls in the program. That could be better of course but it is growing.
…
I highly recommend you drop in on one. FIRST has to be seen to really be understood.