When were you inspired?

[Cory]

Going to Nationals in 2002 (my second year).

I was awestruck by everything. Showing up and seeing what amounted to a small tent city in a parking lot at Disney World, with a massive stadium set up around Einstein, plus all the amazing robots, and people. Particularly seeing the Einstein eliminations... 60 vs 71 and 180 vs 71 were instant classics.

I'm very glad I made it to the last year it was in Orlando. It's been a completely different experience every year since then. Orlando had so much more atmosphere and camaraderie between teams than Atlanta seems to. You couldn't go *anywhere* around the various Disney parks, or other local attractions without running into multiple other teams. Plus the vast majority of teams all stayed at the Disney hotels, so everyone was in a central location and could hang out.

Those were the days...

[dlavery]

OK, I am going to violate a rule a little bit here, and re-tell the story of the first FRC competition I ever attended. The competition itself was an amazing experience. But the inspiration came from the effects of that competition on our entire team, and the lasting effects of the lessons we learned there.

The first FIRST competition I ever attended was the Championships in 1996, held at EPCOT in Orlando. This was way back when the entire competition was held on the little stage at the American Adventure Theatre in the U.S.A. pavilion at the back of EPCOT, not the big “Olympic Village” that sprawled all over the parking lot. We had absolutely no idea of what we were getting in to that year. No one on the team had ever seen a FIRST competition, or even a FIRST robot, before. The lead teacher was the only one that was able to go to the kick-off, so literally all we had was a kit of parts, a rule book, and a complete misunderstanding of what we were supposed to do.

We spend six weeks building a thing that vaguely resembled a robot – but only when you looked at it with the lights really low and your eyes all squinty. There wasn’t a straight line or square corner anywhere on it. It was painted with poster paints, and decorated with a big smiley face, with a few business cards stapled on (tape was forbidden!) to provide the required corporate logos. The chains connecting the motors to the drive wheel sprockets stayed on perfectly - as long as we didn’t try to actually move. We then spent the last two days of the build season taking the entire robot apart. You see, that was the first year that FedEx donated shipping the robot. The offer of free shipping was great, but there was a catch. The donation was limited to shipping three standard FedEx boxes of materials. You know, the ones that are 3x4x36 inches or 3x11x16 inches, or just big enough to hold a few pieces of paper. We thought that you HAD to use the donated shipping service – it never occurred to us that we could just pack up the entire robot into a crate and ship the whole thing as a unit, as long as we paid for it (the way virtually every other team did it). So we took the entire robot apart and made a pile of 5000 little tiny pieces, then poured all the parts into the FedEx shipping boxes and sent them on their way.

So we show up at the competition on Thursday morning and walk into the pits, which were in an open-sided tent in the back lot behind the U.S.A. pavilion. Our eyes got as big around as dinner plates as we looked around at all the highly engineered machines and teams decked out in team uniforms and/or styled t-shirts, and realized how completely out-classed we were. We found our pit and looked at the pitiful little pile of FedEx boxes on the floor waiting for us. Next to our pit on one side the Baxter Bomb Squad already had their machine out of the crate and was going through pre-flight tests. On the other side the robot from a certain other unnamed team was sitting under a hand-embroidered dust cover, with a velvet rope stretched across the front of their pit area to keep their students away from the robot. While most other teams spent the entire day practicing, we spent all Thursday re-assembling our little robot and getting all the parts to work again - or in some cases, for the first time.

Meanwhile, that certain other team on the other side of us spent much of the day Thursday watching us struggling to put our robot back together, while theirs sat under its hand-embroidered dust cover. After giggling at our plight, they turned and walked away. But then we got our first exposure to the FIRST standard of gracious professionalism. Four of the engineers and students on the Bomb Squad team loaned us tools and spent most of the day with us in our pit helping us rebuild the robot, for which we were eternally grateful (by the way, that year they built a very cool little custom suction cup out of polycarbonate that worked with the wimpy little 20psi pumps we had, and picked up the 24 inch balls like there was no tomorrow).

As Friday rolled around and we started the double-elimination rounds, we started to get our first taste of the competition. We won several of our matches, not too bad for a rookie team. We also discovered a huge tactical error we had made – not bringing a cart for the robot. The trudge from the pits out into the open area of EPCOT, dodging through tourists, and over to the American Adventures stage was about 150 yards. After about thirteen times of carrying the robot back and forth, we could swear that the robot was gaining significant weight.

Meanwhile, that certain other team on the other side of us spent the entire day very obviously laughing at us as we trudged back and forth carrying the robot, while they gracefully glided their robot around on a custom-built cart. But then late in the day on Friday we were up against them in a match and we won and knocked them into the “losers bracket” of the double-elimination competition. As we were carrying the robot back to the pits, we overhead one of their engineers complaining about “the crappy little robot” that had beaten them (yes, I still remember who they were, and yes, I admit that I can't help but hold a little bit of a grudge).

That was when we learned a lesson from the folks on the Bomb Squad team and Larry Crawford from Team 120. They all told us not to sweat the occasional rough edges that may show up during a FIRST competition, and instead focus on what was really happening. The students on the team were getting a chance to apply all the theory they had learned in the classroom. They were getting a chance to work with adults as peers, and see how professionals worked. They were getting the opportunity to see other great and soon-to-be-great teams in competition, and hang out with them to make new friends and exchange information. And a whole new generation of technically literate engineers, technologists, scientists, and inventors was being created right in front of us.

With that perspective, we set out to get as much out of the event as possible. We met a whole bunch of up-and-coming new teams like the Baxter Bomb Squad, the X-Cats, Orange Crush, Technokats, Tigerbolt, Wildstang and a young Chief Delphi team. We had the chance to watch several of these teams go on to become some of the best-known teams in FIRST. As a young team, a lot of our focus was on the “competition” part of the program, and we really wanted to get good enough to take on some of the emerging powerhouses of FIRST. Chief Delphi, with their very impressive performances during those early competitions, quickly became a team that a lot of our students wanted to defeat, with the reasoning that “if we are ever good enough to beat them, we can beat anybody.” But in the process, we had a lot of discussions about HOW Chief Delphi got to be as good as they were, and the obvious emphasis they put on simplicity, creativity, quality in their designs, and their whole approach to the FIRST program.

I knew that the students on our team really understood what FIRST was all about when, two years later, our unofficial team motto changed from “we want to BEAT Chief Delphi” to “we want to BE Chief Delphi.” And ever since, the whole focus of our team has been less on the competition itself, and a lot more on the build season and making sure that both students and adults get the most out of the entire experience.

So to all those teams that inspired us during our early years, and helped us figure out how to focus on the most important parts of FIRST, we want to once again give a big “thank you!”

-dave


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[vivek16]

For me, it was probably the competition and Chief Delphi. A public forum really let me connect with other teams in a way that I couldn't in any other program.
I don't think it was any one WOW moment although I've had a lot of those and they are all inspiring.

thanks, Vivek

[sgreco]

Originally Posted by vivek16

For me, it was probably the competition and Chief Delphi. A public forum really let me connect with other teams in a way that I couldn't in any other program.
I don't think it was any one WOW moment although I've had a lot of those and they are all inspiring.

thanks, Vivek

Chief Delphi is definitely very inspiring. Checking it every and seeing what people in the FIRST comunity are thinking and doing is inspiring. (does anyone have a number of how many members there are on CD?)

Seeing elite teams duke it out at Nationals, IRI and many of the regionals is great. To me, there is nothing more inspiring than being at and competing at a regional. Second to that just sitting at your computer on a saturday and during the competions and watching soap gameday.

[Madison]

I don't think that I was ever really inspired by FIRST in the sense that most people expect the inspiration mechanism to work. I have always been interested in design and engineering, though FIRST has given me tremendous opportunities to learn about those interests in non-traditional and exciting ways.

I've tried to tell this story a bunch of times on these boards and it never quite comes out right and I delete what I've written and move on. I'll try to do better here.

In 2002, I was at the Championship for the third time since starting FIRST in 1999, and though I was in college, I was not mature or useful enough to be a mentor in any capacity. I'd just lead a rookie team through the first, very successful season and managed the design and production of my first robot, but I was feeling around in the dark the entire way. I was young, naive and stupid -- whereas now I guess I'm just stupid -- and was still in FIRST because I got to play around with someone else's money. It was still very much about me.

It's a shame that most of the people in FIRST nowadays weren't around to see how amazing the events held down at Epcot were. Dave mentioned the "Olympic Village" in his post and that describes it perfectly. We had a wrap party back then, too, but instead of carnival games and inflatables, everyone was invited into Epcot's Future World West -- home to The Land, The Living Seas and the Imagination Pavilion. There was food everywhere, dancing, and we had free run of the attractions in each pavilion.

One of those attractions was Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, a 3D film sponsored by Kodak and part of the Imagination Pavilion. The theater sat 600 people, but before entering, everyone was first loaded into a preshow room and asked to watch a short film, provided by Kodak.

The film used a variation on Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors,"and the room was filled with 600 excited students, parents and mentors that probably had one of the most amazing experiences of their life in the last three days.

Words would pop up on screen, accompanied by pictures -- imagination, creativity, inspiration -- and everybody went nuts; cheering, screaming, clapping.

I'd never really felt like this was anything more than a neat diversion until that moment. Then, though, I immediately realized that I was surrounded by 600 people that wanted to make the world a better place. These were the people that are going to cure cancer and save the environment and campaign for human rights all over the world.

I'm reasonably intelligent, but I never thought that I'd be among the people doing that important work. It weighs too heavily on me -- or maybe I'm just too easily distracted -- but that night, in that theater among those people, I realized that the very best I could offer those people and my team is to be a good mentor and leader and give them all the encouragement they need to do the amazing things they're all meant to do. I'm hard on them; heaven knows I'm hard on everyone, but I've become enormously protective of FIRST and of the circumstances that let that experience happen to me.

So, yeah -- I guess that's it. FIRST inspired me to become a pain in the patootie or something.

[phr34kR]

For me it was probably attending the robotics boot camp. It was the first time I ever got to see a competition robot. Also being one of the students who got to assemble one of the KoP drive trains and help wire it was very inspiring. Also spending a lot of time since then on Chief Delphi has been a help in furthering my understanding of FIRST. Thanks team 1138 for running the robotics boot camp, Can’t wait until I get to compete.

Tim.

[ttldomination]

You know, I thinkt he best thing for new members is the competitions environment. I was truly inspired during our fall competition. Wanting to go out there and compete again, was amazing.

Then, after regionals. There were perspective students in the stands. At least 5 walked up to me and said they were definitely doing this next year. It's all about competing. winning or losing, competitions are always fun and get the adrenaline pumping.

[R.C.]

Originally Posted by Cory

Going to Nationals in 2002 (my second year).

I was awestruck by everything. Showing up and seeing what amounted to a small tent city in a parking lot at Disney World, with a massive stadium set up around Einstein, plus all the amazing robots, and people. Particularly seeing the Einstein eliminations... 60 vs 71 and 180 vs 71 were instant classics.

Ditto, but for me it was 2007.