The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is a competition aimed at helping high-school-aged students learn about the possible roles of engineers and researchers in creating solutions to a given task. Given a six-week time frame, the teams are challenged to build a robot that is able to overcome the given problem, which varies year to year. At the competition, the teams are placed in randomly-created alliances, and the teams must work together to complete the task. FIRST Homepage
The 2007 FRC challenge is to place inner tubes on a "spider-rack" of eight horizontal beams that extend from a common center. With three different levels of the rack, the placement of the tubes determine the points awarded, ranging from 2 points for a single tube to 256 points for a row of eight tubes.
The First Vex competition consisted of 32 teams competing against and with each other at the regional tournament in NJ(The Garden State Rumble). Not only did teams have to compete against other teams, but they were placed in randomly generated alliances. This made it so you had to work willingly and well with different people and personalities.
The goal of the First Vex competition was to score goals with softballs. The way it worked was; you had a square shaped field big enough to hold 4 robots and the goals. The goals were set up so that each team had one low goal (worth one point) and two high goal (worth three points). The low goal was set up in a corner so that a robot could push the balls into it by rolling them along the ground. The high goals were set up on a wall and was about 2 feet tall. This made it so that robots with robotic arms could reach up to the top of the goal and place them inside. There was also the Atlas Ball in the center of the field. The Atlas Ball was big. Whichever team had the Atlas Ball on their side would double their ball score. The Atlas Ball was placed under a bar, the bar was about 24 inches off the ground, and any robot that could lift itself up onto this bar would get an extra 15 points.