Pittsburgh FIRST

welcome

The hardest fun you’ll ever have! Combine the excitement of sports, science and technology, business management, marketing, and fundraising while competing with your teammates in a unique varsity Sport for the Mind™. In just six weeks, with the guidance of adult Mentors, your team will design, build, program and test your robot to meet the season’s challenge. As part of an FRC team, 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 over $20 million in college scholarships

Featured Pictures

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Steamworks Logo

In First Robotics, teams have to complete different tasks to earn points for their alliance. An alliance is three different teams working together to earn the most points possible. In this year's game there were three tasks a team could complete to earn points:

Fuel

Teams can either shoot fuel into the top of the boiler (3 fuel = 1 point) or teams can put fuel into the bottom of the boiler(9 fuel = 1 point)

Gears

Gears are placed on the airship by robots and then lifted into the airship by human players. It takes different amounts of gears to rotate certan rotars, the more rotars at the end of the match the more points your alliance receives.

Climbing

During the last 30 seconds of a match, human players in the airship drop ropes for robots to climb. Each robot at the top of their rope by the end of the match scores 50 points for their allaince.

Also, during the first thirty seconds of a match robots are autonomous, meaning no one is driving them and they run by themselves.

This is the 2017 First Steamworks. To go to their website click the following link: FIRST Robotics

To watch the FIRST Steamworks animation click here.

To hear the FIRST Steamworks theme song click here.

Team 4991

Our drive team (from left to right): Abby "Chid" Chidlow, Morgan Carroll, Tommy Adebiyi, Dante, Will "Billiam" Zheng and our mentor Jeffrey Macek creeping in the background

Team 4991, Horsepower Robotics, is an FRC team. Their rookie year was in 2014, in their four years of being a team they have went to the Wold competition twice: once in 2014 and once in 2017. In the 2017 season, Horsepower had 32 members and were led by their mentors, Jeffrey Macek and Chadley Warren. Their robot, Silver Charm, focused on two aspects of the game, gears and climbing. Horsepower was also accepted into the WOW Chapionship becuase they were ranked sixth out of thirty two teams.

For more information about Horsepower Robotics click here.

First Tech Challenge

First Tech Challenge is a competition for kids from grades 7-12. The format of the game is basically a smaller version of FRC matches. In FTC, alliances only contain 2 teams and the games contain different challenges and themes.

To learn more about FTC click here.

Watch the 2016-2017 FTC game, Velocity Vortex, animation here.

First Lego League

First Lego League is a robotics competion for kids in grades 4-8. FLL is a great way to get Middle School aged kids interested in robotics. Building the robot is sinple with Lego peices and the code is easy to learn and understand.

To learn more about FLL click here.

Watch the 2016-2017 FLL Animal Allies video here.

First Lego League Junior

First Lego League Junior is a competition for children ages 6-10. In FLL Jr. kids get a real world problem to research and come up with a solution to. They make a poster and a working model of their solution out of Legos to be looked over and scored by judges. A team can earn points for creativity, presentation, model functionality and more.

To learn more about FLL Jr. click here.

Girls of Steel

Girls of Steel is the only all girls team in the Pittsburgh region. Their goal is to try and get girls interested in engineering and computer careeres because their is a lack of women in those feilds.

To learn more about Girls of Steel click here.