Explaining the FIRST Competition to Others...

[MooreteP]

One of the more interesting explanations I have heard: "It's like a Grateful Dead concert with Robots."

A competition, especially in the years before colored bumpers, was inscrutable.
New spectators would see a bunch of Robots moving back and forth around a field; throwing objects, dragging implements, running into each other, climbing on top of each other, while the audience appeared to cheer at random intervals. Then a buzzer would sound and one of the teams was declared a winner for no discernible reason.
Meanwhile, all of these teenagers and adults in the audience would dance like crazy on cue, as if they were all privy to some secret code of behavior.

Originally Posted by JohnBoucher

Define it as an engineering challenge that teams build a solution for and test their solutions in a competitive format.

This is good, I describe the game as a complex Problem, with anywhere from 30 to 60 solutions all competing to see who came up with the best Solution (Robot)

Originally Posted by Libby K

Nothing shows off the magnitude of FIRST like being there.

My go-to, if you can't drag someone to competition, is just to have a video or two ready on your phone. (Thank goodness for the 21st century!) I use the Morgan Freeman one.

How I do the 'qualifications' part:
"Well, for the first day of competition, the teams are randomly set up on alliances - one match you could be with the school down the road, and then you could be against them! By matching them up against each other in different ways, they're able to rank who's the best performing robot out of the 40-60 robots there could be at the regionals."

Alliance selection:
"After the robots are all ranked, the top 8 get to pick teams that they want to play with through the whole of the elimination rounds - no more randoms! It's really important for the teams to scout out who's the best match for them so they know how to form the best alliance."

This is also succinct advice.
Morgan Freeman = good explanation.

Having some prime videos on your phone really helps to explain: 1) The Program. FIRST has many personal interview PR videos that are useful. Here is one source that I have used:
http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...ips-frc?id=652

Good match videos that show the game can be harder to find as our point of view of the match is different from someone seeing it for the first time.
Plus, the game changes every year, so their shelf life is short.
I have been using this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdcKp_V9ISI
Team Titanium's POV.

I have also been totally digging these videos from Detroit Public television for explanations of the matches:
http://www.dptv.org/programs/robotic...cmpgn=shorturl
Dave Verbrugge describes the matches and strategies with interviews of team members before and after matches. Too long for a quick phone video, but very comprehensive.

I work with the Media Center at the CMP, so we have many newcomers visiting for the first time with little background information needing to create an article or video about the event.
What we do is find out where they are from and generate a short list of teams from their area, as well as other teams they may find interesting (HoF, International, Rookies).
We take them down to the pits and find a team, then we introduce them to any student, who are the best acolytes of FIRST. The process runs itself from there. By following a team from their pits through a match provides the experience that they can distill into a story that best explains the program. These are journalists and they know how to explain an event to an audience that has little information.
An example of one such product:
http://www.channelone.com/video/the-...s-competition/