On Saturday, Jan. 5, Capitol College welcomed more than 450 high school students, family members and mentors to the Avrum Gudelsky Auditorium for the 2013 Maryland FIRST Robotics Kickoff Event.
During the kickoff, high school students from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington D.C. received the kit of parts with which they will design their robots for the 2013 FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). The Chesapeake Regional FRC will be held in Baltimore, Md. from April 11-13.
Before picking up their kits, the students gathered and watched a live feed from NASA-TV that provided them information on this year’s competition. FIRST Robotics students from across the globe received the information through the NASA-TV feed. Student teams have six weeks to build their robots and strategically prepare for the FRC.
This year’s competition is titled “Ultimate Ascent,” and according to FIRST Robotics “[The competition] is played by two competing alliances on a flat, 27 x 54 foot field. Each alliance consists of three robots, and they compete to score as many discs into their goals as they can during a two-minute and 15-second match.”
This was the ninth consecutive year that Capitol has hosted the FRC Kickoff. Capitol College is one of the largest providers of scholarships to FIRST students in the United States, with more than $500,000in scholarship offers to date.