I amAndyMark excited to extend an invitation to the 2024 Founder’s Reception! The event will be Friday night, January 5, 2024 from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM ET. The Founder’s Reception is hosted by FIRST ® Founder Dean Kamen at his home, WestWind, in Bedford, New Hampshire.
Each registered FIRST ® Robotics Competition team is invited to register two adult attendees. Registration for the event will be open via the FIRST Dashboard beginning noon eastern time, October 5. Registration for the event closes at noon eastern time December 14.
FIRST ® Robotics Competition Kickoff
Kickoff for the 2024 FIRST Robotics Competition season is at noon eastern, Saturday January 6, 2024! That’s just 93 days!
For folks from New Hampshire, or those accustomed to travelling to New Hampshire for Kickoff, this year will be a little different. For participants and volunteers who are used to watching the broadcast on Twitch at a local kickoff, at your team’s workspace, or at home, things may look relatively similar.
In recent years, we’ve had a mix of live (like the segments with Dean Kamen, Chris Moore, and me last year) and pre-recorded content (like the video of 2022 Woodie Flowers Award winner Christine Sapio). This year, we are fully pre-recording the broadcast. We think that pre-recording the content will allow us to create a more engaging Kickoff broadcast that better reflects the global FIRST Robotics Competition community.
The broadcast will still have the content you need to get started with CRESCENDOSM presented by Haas, including a field walkthrough, field tour videos, and a first look at the 2024 KitBot.
Teams who traditionally attended the live Kickoff event can attend the New Hampshire local kickoff event being coordinated by FIRST New Hampshire. Specific details on that event are coming soon.
So I’ve heard of this Founder’s Reception before, and I think they’ve even done some streaming on Twitch of it in some recent years that I saw parts of. But I’m trying to understand what the purpose of it is, both from FIRST/Dean’s side and from the attendees. Is it just something for people to go ogle what’s in Dean’s house (which does sound fun)? Just informal networking between mentors? Are the only attendees the people nominated by teams, or are there other sponsors of FIRST or non-team-affiliated volunteers there too? I’d just love to know more about it, maybe just because it seems so exclusive.
Some of the main presenters have been know to to give rambling speeches. Even going over the allotted time. So prerecorded for something like this should be better.
I think there was more of a point to it with the opportunity of attending the main kick off with a full field the next day. I expect it will be more of a local thing this year. Other than that it is mostly a meet and greet and celebration to the start of the season. Now if you were invited to the after-party…
And if it’s pre-recorded it can be translated ahead of time for non-native English speakers potentially. Or at least easier to add captions to for hearing disabled (this is impossible with a live stream, now FIRST at least could theoretically do this)
I went in 2017 and it was a lot of fun! Basically all of your guesses are right. Dean’s house was cool, it was great to meet lots of other mentors from around the country (I don’t recall whether I met anyone from outside the US), there were short interesting speeches from Dean, Woodie, and other higher-ups. I remember Woodie’s talk was really inspiring, he talked about how he and his wife had had a “two-person book club” for decades and one of the mind-expanding books they’d just read. I got to meet Dean and he gave me a business card and told me to apply for a job at DEKA (I had just graduated college and already had a job lined up, but it was still neat). We got to walk around Dean’s machine shop, which is right there in the house, and walk around looking at all of his & DEKA’s inventions that he had on display. There was some good food. At the time it was invitation-only, so it was very exciting to have an invitation to an exclusive thing and get dressed up and rub elbows with FIRST leadership. And of course we got to go to the live kickoff the next day which was amazing.
All in all it was fun, and I’m glad to have gone once, but I don’t know if it would be worth going again, especially without Woodie there.
The primary target of the Founder’s Reception are sponsors and partners of FIRST HQ, but the event has become more inclusive of mentors and volunteers in recent-ish years.
Didn’t put it together until reading your comment, but I’d bet the main reason mentors and volunteers were invited (at least back in 2017) was so that we could share our experiences with FIRST with the sponsors and partners (informally, as we milled around chatting with people and eating hors d’oeuvres). I had come into contact with someone in FIRST HQ’s leadership team a few months prior (long story) and shared my very heartwarming new-mentor story, and the two things always seemed vaguely related but I hadn’t put together like that.
I know this wasn’t the point of your post, but it’s not at all impossible to caption a livestream.
There are automated - yet imperfect - ways of doing it directly embedded in Twitch or YouTube content, which home-grown livestream creators have been using for years. (And the success rates for translation are far better than whatever the on-screen solution was during Einstein this year.) There’s also entirely the possibility of transcription being available, though there is a slight lag behind production.
Hopefully pre-recorded means captions aplenty - I have seen improvement from FIRST media pieces on this and hope to see continued expansion of accessible options.