The FIRST Robotics six-week build season provides the classic garage start-up environment. You must bring to life your ideas with limited time, resources, and people. FIRST Robotics competitions are high energy, fun, and exciting events; the air is electric. For many participants, this is the rock concert of engineering. Participants will be releasing the pent up energy and excitement built up over 6 weeks designing and building their robot. You can expect to see a festival of lights, sounds, colors, and team regalia.
Nowhere else can you find an arena filled with thousands of kids cheering wildly for a game played by robots and even more kids furiously rewiring, reprogramming, and repairing bots to get them back on the field.
In addition to attendance from teams from anywhere in the region, US, or the world (there are teams in Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Israel, etc) and attendance by parents and team supporters, you are also likely to see news crews, local elected officials, and representatives from major corporations.
The official rules for FIRST competitions can be found here: https://www.firstinspires.org/resource-library/frc/event-experience. The rest of this section of the manual contains information gathered from the team's experience in previous years of competition.