A Party for 40,000 People. Sorry, We Mean a Robotics Competition

In its 23rd year, the FIRST Championship draws more than geeks.

"Robot!" a dozen high school boys in yellow-and-black striped pants shouted behind us. They were rushing a metal robot with a mechanical arm, a meter taller than any of them, down the aisle. We stepped aside fast to let them through.

It was the phrase I heard most at the end of last month, and it sums up the scene. At the convention center in St. Louis, Missouri, more than 6,000 youth teams from 40 countries had gathered for the three-day 2015 FIRST Championship.

Some competitors were tuning robots about to go on the field; others were checking out what their rivals had brought.

Volunteers aged 15 to 60 were pitching in. Staff from universities and tech companies were meeting student competitors at their booths. Parents and grandparents had come from all over to cheer on their kids. In all, more than 40,000 people. The hall was so packed that students hurrying to a match or a practice round had to shout "Robot!" to clear the way.

Janne, an 11th-grader, and the rest of Team 1255 all wore purple-and-yellow hats topped with foam antennae. "It's a fish with four legs called the Blargle Fish. It's our team mascot," she said. The fish is a creature of legend, though. Search Google and the most detailed account you will find is on Team 1255's own website:

We ran into Cayla and Marco, who collect pins from every booth. They wear every pin they have gathered as they walk around the hall:

"Isn't this all just a fight for attention?" Karl, from Team 2512, told QDaily. To win it, his team picked red-and-white striped blazers, with baggy pants and hats in the same pattern:

This is the 2015 FIRST Championship, America's youth robotics championship. It is a world-level contest, but to us it felt more like one big teenage party.

A robotics contest that feels like a teenage party and a ballgame

This is the 23rd FIRST Championship. Its founder, Dean Kamen, also founded the company behind the Segway personal transporter. The event now draws 40,000 people. Its sponsors include tech companies such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, Texas Instruments and Autodesk, as well as traditional companies with little connection to robots, such as Coca-Cola and FedEx.

The name comes from the organizer, a youth nonprofit also called FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology).

Every year FIRST works with its tech sponsors to run regional youth robotics competitions in 40 countries. The top teams from each region come to St. Louis for the championship.

Even "youth" may not be the right word: the competitors range in age from 6 to 18. They are split into four age groups, each with its own event. For elementary school children there are the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) and the Junior FIRST LEGO League, where kids build small robots mainly out of LEGO.

For middle and high school students there is the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC), in which they build metal robots a few dozen centimeters tall. Then there is the top tier, the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), also for middle and high school students. In six weeks they must build a robot of around 50 kilograms, with a mechanical arm, wheels and software that lets it run on its own.

The best part is that every year each group gets new rules and a new theme. Even when all teams chase the same goal, whether collecting balls on the field or stacking boxes, their robots can differ completely, from design to software.

"If there were a thousand teams, you'd probably see 999 different robots," said Jiading, from Nanjing. His team came second in China's FTC competition, which earned it a place at the St. Louis party.

When we got to talking about interesting robot teams, Jiading eagerly introduced his friends from "987": High Roller, a team from a Las Vegas high school. 987 is their team number.

Every team at the event has a unique number, set by how early it registered with FIRST. Team 1 most likely registered at the first competition in 1992. The number 987 likewise shows that High Roller signed up early; they qualified for the world championship back in 2002. Jiading's team registered much later and is number 9755.

Team 987 competes in the hardest group, FRC. This year's theme is "Recycle Rush." Each team has six weeks to build its robot. In two minutes the robot must stack as many gray boxes, each half a meter square, as high as it can, then set a giant trash can about a meter tall on top of the stack, and finally stick a pipe into the can.

Words can't do the action justice, so we filmed one of the 987 alliance's matches:

The atmosphere was like a live sporting event, with referees, commentators, a live feed on the big screen and the kind of music arenas play to pump up the crowd.

Once a match starts, the two sides, three teams each, send out six operators who work under pressure. From the stands nearby come the screams and cheers of other team members and teachers.

Team 987, in reddish-brown T-shirts, built an unusual robot for this contest. Most teams used two mechanical arms to grip the tall trash cans. 987's robot had three needle-like arms that could hook three cans at once and lift them steadily, then slide gray boxes in underneath. That made it very efficient.

You may have noticed many other young people in different outfits on the field besides 987. This is the most interesting part of FIRST: the alliance system. The field is split into a blue side and a red side, and each side must have three robots working at once. Since each team has only one robot, every team in the qualifying rounds must find two others to form an alliance. Even with a well-designed robot, 987 still needed two partners. They chose 2512 and 2326 because those teams' robots were very fast.

Alliances make the game more interesting. They also mean a robot team needs more than its programmers and mechanics, the "geeks." Scouting and public relations matter just as much. Because the teams and robots change every year, there is a great deal of research and talking to do on site. That is why we saw young people in odd costumes running all over the hall.

For a good robot team, the competition itself is only a small part of the work.

"I handle PR and marketing for the team," Elisabeth Gomes, an 11th-grader on Team 1538, told QDaily. She says she is not good at sports or math, but a robot team needs someone like her to handle outreach. For the 360 days of the year outside the championship, she writes the team's promotional copy and talks to sponsors, getting the team's name out so it can raise enough money.

Many teams have their own website. 987 High Roller built a dedicated site that lists their sponsors, including the latest news of a partnership with Lowe's, the American home-improvement retailer.

Not just robots: government and tech companies take part too

All over the FIRST Championship, the slogan "More Than Robots" is printed on banners and brochures.

Don Bossi, chief executive of FIRST, the nonprofit that runs the event, told QDaily: "We're not stressing that young people should build robots for their own sake. We want them to enjoy everything through the competition and have fun: math, programming, teamwork, meeting other young people."

"Fun" is a word Bossi uses a lot. "Beyond the competition, we put a lot of emphasis on young people having fun, which is why we work with a company like LEGO. I think our volunteers and our corporate sponsors help enormously."

FIRST's sponsors include plenty of tech companies and related organizations: Google, Qualcomm, Microsoft, GitHub, Dell, 3M, NASA, even the US Air Force. Some give money; others give staff time as well. Qualcomm, this year's biggest sponsor, sends its engineers as "mentors" to guide the young people through their robot projects.

That is not all. Qualcomm CTO Matt Grob told QDaily that the company is on site looking for promising young people to become Qualcomm interns. Kiet Chau, now a Qualcomm engineer, was hired because of the robotics competition. He is back this year as a mentor, coaching a team.

"Before the competition, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a living. I just liked playing video games. I only started thinking about becoming an engineer after I competed and then interned at Qualcomm," Kiet told us.

More striking still is the backing from US government agencies. At FIRST's opening ceremony, President Obama sent a video message telling the young people to enjoy building robots and not to worry about failing.

The US Air Force, another FIRST sponsor, set up a booth to promote itself and sent 28 engineers to mentor students. NASA likewise gives both money and people. Outside the competition area, engineering deans from universities such as Yale and MIT sat at booths recruiting on the spot, hoping more students who love engineering, math and robots would join their departments.

There were also several thousand volunteers in orange T-shirts, aged 15 to 60. Many had competed themselves or work in engineering. By Bossi's figures, if you convert volunteer hours into full-time work (five days a week, eight hours a day), FIRST has the equivalent of 3,000 people working for it full-time all year. They include company employees, teachers and former FIRST competitors who have come back to help.

"Today in the US, 15% to 20% of schools have students in FIRST competitions. That is what more than 20 years of work has achieved," Bossi told us. The next step is to bring FIRST to children from poorer backgrounds, mainly by getting sponsors and partner companies to waive their costs of entering and building robots.

China has FIRST competitions too

In the final, the 987 alliance lost 1-2.

After the match, Mohawk, an 11th-grader who is one of 987's mechanics and drives the robot on the field, told QDaily: "I'm really happy. I really enjoyed the whole thing. We made a few small mistakes in the last match, and our opponents took their chance. Their robot was really good too."

He may look punk, but Mohawk speaks calmly and kindly. He said 987 will go to Shenzhen this year to share what they know with FIRST competitors in China.

That is how Jiading met 987, on the team's last trip to China. FIRST robotics competitions have in fact come to China, where FIRST has hired a company called Xmiya to run the regional events. But Jiading said the mood in China is very different: "In China everyone cares a lot about the results. Here it feels more like play."

Robotics earns no bonus points on the gaokao, China's college entrance exam, so few students can give it time outside class. Jiading attends Nanjing Foreign Language School and does not plan to take the gaokao, which is why he has time for FIRST. The team that won first place in China gave up its trip to St. Louis because of exams.