FIRST 101 [9/17/05]

[MissInformation]

What a cool idea for telling the history of FIRST! Our head teacher resigned this past year and we put together a scrapbook for him of his 6 or 7 years on the team. We ended up at Dave's house because his wife, Carol, does scrapbooking and offered (was volunteered?) to help us with it. I had photos from 2001 and onward, but we wanted some earlier ones too. Dave brought out stacks and stacks of photos from all the years he's been involved in FIRST, and I finally got to see some photos of games prior to 2000. Wow! I could have spent all night looking at those pictures, they were too cool! The game that involved putting the "donuts" on the spinning coat rack type thing looked like a lot of fun!

Unfortunately, there is usually not enought time to teach a lot of FIRST history to the team, not with everything else they have to learn, but having threads like this one for anyone to read is a good idea!

Heidi

[team222badbrad]

Soon after Rumble, competitions started spouting up all over the place. River Rage which is the current oldest running competition, Battlecry, IRI, BOMB...they all led off the example set by PNTA and Rumble at the Rock.

Yup, River Rage has us beat by one year.

The Pennsylvania Robotics Challenge AKA PARC was started in 1998 by the TIGERTRONS 222, PARC will turn nine years old on some Saturday in May of 2006.

Go PARC for being the 2nd longest running off-season!

What I think would be cool to do is to create a chart that contains all the off-season competitions.

It would be cool to see how the off-seasons have grown from the first year to what they are today. I wonder how many off-seasons were hosted just this year and what the growth rate is?

[Kevin Kolodziej]

I had the priveledge of attending Rumble at the Rock IV and it was certainly a competition I will never forget. They even had some skills competitions going on that year too, which were really neat (I wish more off-season competitions would reduce their amount of teams so that they can spend some time having fun competitions like that). The BOMB in 2000 featured a whole day of robot dancing, 1v1 matches, races, obstacle courses, and others. Sorry...got a bit off topic there!

Somehow I got a floppy from the Rumble that year...a very nice piece in my collection.

Way to go on this great idea to bring back excellent history that the younger members may not know about.

Kev

[AmyPrib]

Just a sidenote - look for some serious history "stuff" or "compilations", etc. from Team 45 in the coming months/season. It's a work in progress, and spans 15yrs...

I have now seen a lot of things in the old days that are verrrry different today.... Oh, and I've seen a lot of you veterans and mentors back in the early years too...