I was just wondering how did most people learn about FRC and what it was? Personally I found out about FRC in 5th grade with my schools FLL team was started by my now current FRC team.
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My city used to have a science museum that hosted science fairs once a year where local companies and the Savannah River National Lab would come and demo projects primarily aimed at entertaining and inspiring kids. In 2005/06 the lab had a group of of engineers at the time that decided to get together and build a robot to compete on Battlebots when it was still on Comedy Central. They were having a demonstration of their robot Jabberwock and after the demo was finished I walked up and asked questions about the robot. The man speaking to me about the robot happened to be one of 1102’s founding mentor Clyde Ward who told my parents and I about the team and their FIRST Lego League program they had in our area.
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I walked into my school’s extracurricular fair.
The rest is history.
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One of my friends moved here from North Bay in grade 6, and promptly started an FLL team here. I have been in it ever since.
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First time I heard it, 3739 was recruiting from the local middle schools because of low interest at the high school level. I joined up (unfortunately the only one they got through this process) and that’s a pretty straight forward story. Went on to make a new team during a teacher’s strike in 2012, and that’s how you get 4814 and the rest of the London ONT area follows suit.
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My 6th grade daughter, who had recently received a LEGO Mindstorm kit for her birthday, watched the will.i.am FIRST special with all the pop stars when it was shown on TV. She begged me to help her find a team. Guess what? No teams available (shocking, I know), so she recruited a bunch of friends and they started one. I got reluctantly dragged in as the responsible adult. That was 2011. All the kids on that original team just finished college (in the last 1-3 years) and all doing cool things. I don’t think anything they did in FIRST was more valuable than the presentation and “talking with adults” skills they learned in FLL.
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In 1999 an engineer with UTEC (where I worked) had a call out meeting about starting a team. I’ve been hooked since.
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I’m not going to lie when I clicked the link I was expecting the “my robot is better than your robot” song 
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When my coworker/fraternity brother told me that the company sponsored a robotics team and I was going to help mentor them.
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Funny thing is, she got to meet will.i.am a few years later when she came back to help with the Dean’s List dinner at champs. He was at that meal, and stuck around and just chatted with all the kids who stayed for over 30 minutes. She thanked him for helping get her into FIRST. I wonder how many other people learned about FIRST for the first time through things like that TV special, the recent Disney+ special, etc. because there really isn’t a way to quantify it but we know it happens.
(She was also at Champs for his semi-awkward Hall of Fame performance with Dean’s lyrics, and TSIMFD a year or two later.)
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@rsegrest visited my work and asked for mentors.
The back of the Small Parts Catalog had an Ad for FIRST in the late 90’s.
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My schools robotics team did a demo at my elementary school when I was in like 1st grade.
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I blame it all on my daughter’s 4th grade teacher. The teacher called my wife and said, “I really think [daughter] should do this Mindstorms thing.” Yes, we called it Mindstorms instead of FLL for a couple years. 4 years of FLL, 4 years of FRC, and now I’ve volunteered for 20 years.
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I first learned about… uh… FIRST… from the very first time I saw the poster for my current high school robotics team. I’ve been a part of it since my sophomore year.
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My mom saw a Facebook post about the local FTC team when I was in 7th Grade.
She made me reluctantly join.
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my schools team came to middle school classes to show the robot and explain what they do, and 7th grade me thought it was the coolest thing ever, so here I am, 2 yrs later 
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awesome (also nice pfp, my bestie’s sister is obsessed w murder drones loll)
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I’m a physics teacher. One year 90% of the team’s student leadership was in my class. I listened to them discuss, argue, complain about that year’s game. I couldn’t understand why they were preparing for a “1st robotics competition” when it was the team’s 12th year competing.
Long story short - I’ve been hooked ever since.
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Huge shout out to Plasma Robotics for archiving Arizona FRC history and a bunch of these other random videos!
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