About FRC

FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC)

The FIRST Robotics Competition, abbreviated FRC, is an annual competition where high school teams across the country build robots and compete against each other. It is the main competition Team 3128 involves itself in each year.

Each year, teams are given a game and then have six weeks to build a robot designed to compete in that game. After six weeks, teams put the robot in a bag and bring it to a regional competition where they are randomly matched with and against other robots. Top performing robots move to the World Championship Competition.

Build Season / Competition Season

The yearly FRC game is announced on the first or second Saturday of the year at the annual Kickoff event. During this event, teams learn what the game is and get a set of game pieces and useful parts that can be utilized on the robot. This event marks the start of Build Season, which is a period that consists of the six weeks in between Kickoff and Stop Build Day.

Approximately six weeks after the Kickoff event is Stop Build Day, where teams place the robot into a plastic bag and are barred from working on the robot unless they are at a competition.

After Build Season concludes, teams compete in a Regional Competitions. There are over sixty different competitions across the national held during the six weeks following build season, and our team usually competes in two of them.

Regional Competitions are 3-day events where thirty to sixty teams compete against each other. During each competition has three sets of matches: practice matches, qualification matches, and elimination matches. Practice matches allow for teams to test their robot, Qualification matches aim to rank the robots based on ability, and Elimination matches allow teams to compete to move onto the World Championships.

Community Outreach

Outside of the build and competition season, our team aims to reach out to people in our community in order to engage them in STEM topics. Some of the ways we do this:

• Visiting and performing demonstrations at local schools.
• Hosting a robotics summer camp each year for 1st - 8th graders.
• Participating in school pep rallys at the start and beginning of the year.
• Inviting other parts of our school to collaborate with us on projects.