FIRST science teams encourage young people

We have covered FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) in a number of previous articles and are honored to be a small part of their efforts to encourage young people’s interest in the wonders of science and technology. FIRST has four types of afterschool teams: Junior FIRST LEGO League for ages 6 to 9, FIRST LEGO League ages 9 to 16, and FIRST Tech Challenge high school age. FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is also high school and is dubbed a varsity sport for the mind .

Students get to:

• Learn from professional engineers   
• Build and compete with a robot of their own design
• Learn and use sophisticated software and hardware
• Compete and cooperate in alliances and tournaments
• Earn a place in the World Championship
• Qualify for college scholarships

Westlake High

The FRC team from Westlake High School in Austin, TX is a great example. Coached by Norman Morgan, the team reached the semifinals of the 2014 competition last April. The team is named Team Appreciate and is team number 2468. Coach Morgan has more than 50 students involved in FRC at this school.

I spoke with Kylar Osborne, Rachel Gardner, and Ben Gorr, three key team members from Westlake FRC. They said many team members spend 30 to 40 hours a week on the robotics project during their design phase — often including 9 to 5 on Saturday. Their current design uses eight dc motors and provides an interesting real-time software design challenge.

The teams for 2015 will all be using the new roboRIO platform from National Instruments (a major supporter of FIRST), Kylar, who does programming in Lab View for the team, said the addition of USB ports, along with the Ethernet port was very significant for software development and testing. Rachel noted the platform now has a custom electronics port that makes it easier for the team to add their special designs, and Ben, who works on the electronic hardware, says roboRIOs smaller size is a great help.

Fig. 1: Kylar Osborne, Norman Morgan (robotics teacher and coach), Rachel Gardner, and Ben Gorr.  Photo by Francisco Blankemeyer

Ray Hsu, senior program manager, K-12 Education at National Instruments tells me that NI recently had roboRIOs sent out to 3,600 FRC teams. A few teams have had beta versions for some time, including Westlake. The new units use a Xilinx Zynq-7020 FPGA with dual ARM Cortex-A9 cores running at 667 MHz and has 256 Mbytes of RAM, 512 MBbytes of flash, and Linux with real-time extensions. Programming is via LabVIEW, C++, and Java. Ray said “supply the students with really good tools and you are consistently amazed at the creativity and excellence of their designs.”

Fig. 2: The new roboRIO from National Instruments.

Becoming a FIRST FRC mentor

An essential part of FRC are the coachs/mentors. You would make a great mentor. To get involved with this great program just go to http://goo.gl/4grRS8. Who are FIRST mentors and coaches? A mentor or coach:

•   Can be a person of any age, teaching others what they know 
•   Brings either technical or non technical expertise to the team
•   Provides the opportunity for students to learn directly through experiences
•   Begins as a teacher, evolves into a colleague
•   Knows that mentoring and coaching is about inspiring and guiding
•   Provides students the environment to succeed
•   Is patient, supportive, enthusiastic, compassionate, and available
•   Remembers what’s important — it’s about the kids and they come first

Participating companies

You can go here http://goo.gl/hUpoUe for a complete list of FRC suppliers including National Instruments, Autodesk, Texas Instruments, Altium, Microsoft, and many, many others. The FIRST Championship is April 23-26, 2015 in St. Louis — the ultimate celebration of science and technology. Spectators welcome.