[Jessica Boucher]

For those of you who were not at Battlecry, there were 3 Babson students who came to get a sense of FIRST before they do a project on it in the fall. When I first met them 2 years ago, I got the same reaction out of them: "You do Battlebots? That's cool". After giving the explanation, (which is a lot like Fin's explanation above) they did the smile and nod thing just like was also mentioned above.

So what did they say after about an hour of actually watching matches?

"This is the coolest thing ever! I mean, we've watched the webcast before over your shoulder and it seemed kindof silly, but this is really awesome!"

So the moral of the story is: keep a good response for the Battlebots question in the back of your mind, and the best way to hook people on FIRST is to get them to competition.

Another usable sidenote: FIRST was televised on ESPN2 long before the US version of Battlebots came out (I'm not too sure about the timing of the UK series, which spawned the US version).