a little more follow-up on FIRST at Salt Lake ComicCon, with
video from a talented quadcopter pilot/video editor who is a student on our team.
From the video you will note how packed the venue was. At more than one point the fire marshals shut the entrances as the crowd had reached the 80,000 person capacity of the convention center.
The Utah regional competition is in a stadium type venue and gets good attendance, but we've never needed fire marshals for crowd control. Sometimes you have to take the message directly to where the people in addition to trying to get them to visit you. In this sense, Comic Con presence was a big win for FIRST and a nice complementary event to go along with our regional.
It was also great to have three days with a competition field with lots of friendly play but with no competition. For several newcomers on our team this was their first team activity and during it they got to drive a competition robot on a real field in front of hundreds of spectators. They are now hooked! (If we were playing "real" games that "counted" such as in a competitive offseason event there would have been less team enthusiasm for turning over the driver stations to absolute rookies.)
I'll repeat my thanks to RD Richard Anderson and also to Clief Castleton of Team 4585 for their tireless efforts to arrange for a competition field and to organize participation of many teams. If FIRST can pull this off at other similar events it would be well worth it.