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For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology

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For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology

For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) is an international youth organization that operates the FIRST Robotics Competition, FIRST Lego League Challenge, FIRST Lego League Explore, FIRST Lego League Discover, and FIRST Tech Challenge competitions. Founded by Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers in 1989, its expressed goal is to develop ways to inspire students in engineering and technology fields. Its philosophy is expressed by the organization as Coopertition and Gracious Professionalism.

FIRST also operates FIRST Place, a research facility at FIRST Headquarters in Manchester, New Hampshire, where it holds educational programs and day camps for students and teachers.

FIRST operates as a non-profit public charity corporation. It licenses qualified teams, usually affiliated with schools or other youth organizations, to participate in its competitions. The teams in turn pay a fee to FIRST; these fees, the majority of which are redistributed to pay for teams' kit of parts and other services, comprise the majority of revenue of FIRST.

The supreme body of FIRST is its board of directors, which includes corporate executives and former government officials. FIRST also has an executive advisory board and several senior advisors; these advisors include engineers, involved volunteers, and other senior organizers. Day-to-day operations are run by a senior management team, consisting of a CEO and a variety of vice presidents and additional officers for a total of 10 individuals.

The first and highest-scale program developed through FIRST is the FIRST Robotics Competition, which is designed to inspire high school students to become engineers by giving them real world experience working with engineers to develop a robot. The inaugural FIRST Robotics Competition was held in 1992 in the Manchester Memorial High School gymnasium. As of 2019, over 3,700 high school teams totaling over 46,000 students from Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Turkey, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more compete in the annual competition, with more than 9000 teams (active and inactive) in existence.

The competition challenge changes each year, and the teams can reuse only certain components from previous years. The robots weigh at most 125 pounds (56.7 kg), without batteries and bumpers. The kit issued to each team contains a base set of parts. Registration and the kit of parts together cost about US$6,000. In addition to that, teams are allowed to spend another $5,500 on their robot. The purpose of this rule is to lessen the influence of money on teams' competitiveness. Details of the game have been released on the first Saturday in January (except when that Saturday falls on January 1 or 2), and the teams have been given six weeks to construct a robot that can accomplish the game's tasks.

In 2011, teams participated in 48 regional and district competitions throughout March in an effort to qualify for the FIRST Championship in St. Louis in April. Previous years' Championships have been held in Atlanta, Georgia, Houston, Texas and at Walt Disney World's Epcot. On October 7, 2009, FIRST announced that the Championship Event will be held in St. Louis, Missouri for 2011 through 2013. Each year the FIRST Robotics Competition has scholarships for the participants in the program. In 2011, there were over $14 million worth of scholarships from more than 128 colleges and universities, associations, and corporations.[citation needed]

The district competition system was introduced in Michigan and as of 2017 has expanded to include districts in the Pacific Northwest, the Mid-Atlantic, the Washington DC area, New England, Georgia, North Carolina, Ontario, and Israel. When they were created in 2017, the Ontario and Israel districts became the first districts outside of the United States. The district competition system changed the traditional "regional" events by allowing teams to compete in multiple smaller events and using an associated ranking algorithm to determine which teams would advance to the next level of the competition. In general, there have been pushes to move more regions to the districts system; California, Texas, and New York have especially been pushed to move to the district system.

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