FIRST: "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" is an American foundation, created by the famous inventor Dean Kamen in 1992, has a way to stimulate the high school students to get involve in science and technology.

The program develops different competitions where students of different ages can work in teams with advanced technology, making advanced robots, and with it developing skills as the leadership, and how to work correctly in a team.

For more info, you can visit the official FIRST Webpage: http://www.usfirst.org

The categories of competition are:





The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is a "Mind sport", the highest and hardest FIRST Competition, where students from 14 to 18 years old, supporting by mentors, have to make a robot in six weeks of hard work. After that, the teams go to the different FRC Regional events around the world (march), and finally, the best teams , in April, go to the World FRC Championship.

In this category, we are the only one Chilean team, Corazón de Chileno®.





The FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) is the competition level between the FIRST Robotics and the First Lego Leagues (FLL and Jr. FLL). In the FTC Competition the students have to build robots with a pre-defined kit. In this competition, the members of the teams learn engineering, programming and mechanics.

In Chile, at the end of the year 2008, members of FLL Teams founded the RoboCars FTC Team. The original idea was go to the Mexico FTC Regional, but for monetary troubles, the team never went to that competition.





The FIRST LEGO League is a competition where elementary and high school students (9-16)can develop robots using the NXT LEGO Mindstorms Robots. Each year, the temas make a robot for a thematic challenge (Is not just the robot, the teams also have to work in a project about the year's competition theme). Around the word, a lot of regional events and a huge championship make this competition, with the FRC, the most massives robotics competition in the world.

Chile got a FLL Regional. From it, some teams had clasificated to the world championship. On this, in 2007, the San Ignacio del Bosque High School won the "Honorable Mention Award in Work Team". On 2008 the Fundación Nuestros Hijos team won the "Team Spirit Award". In 2009, the Nocedal College team was been awared with the "Technology Innovation Award". Last year, the Team DragonBots, from San Francisco del Alba High School, had an excellence performance.





The Junior FIRST LEGO League is the newest FIRST competition, where elementary school students, supported by mentors, work trying to overcome a challenge, using tham imagination and engineering and science concepts.