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We are almost two months into the FIRST Relic Recovery Season presented by Qualcomm , and teams are now heavily into the design, building, and coding phase of their year. With so much to do and events beginning to happen around the world, teams may have additional questions as they prepare. The FIRST� Tech Challenge Forums are the perfect place to have those questions answered! We have highlighted these forums in almost every resource shared with our community, but we wanted to take a minute to explain why teams would peruse these pages. The main forums include: �          Game Q and A Forum - The Game Q&A Forum is a place where teams can ask questions and receive official feedback about the game rules, robot rules, advancement criteria, and judging. This forum is monitored and answered by our Game Design Committee and answers are often further clarifications of the game rules. �          Technology For...

Building, programming, recording, connecting with the community, practicing, testing, more testing, and compete. Those are the main steps every team takes during a season and it is our goal here at FIRST� to make sure we have resources to help teams throughout their journey. Teams who compete in the FIRST� Tech Challenge will need to select a programming tool to be able to write programs (referred to as "op modes") for their competition robots. There are currently three recommended programming tools available for teams to use. The recommend tools include the FIRST Tech Challenge Blocks Programming Tool, the FIRST Tech Challenge OnBot Java Programming Tool and Android Studio. FIRST has produced a video that includes a brief overview of each recommended tool and reviews each tool's benefits and disadvantages. Learn more about your options and determine which tool is best suited for your team's needs: Programming resources are located on our  Programming Resources Pag...

ROBOTICON Tampa Bay, now in its 5 th year, is a collaborative effort of several Tampa Bay organizations and partners, including FIRST Affiliate Partners, Alumni and volunteers.  Led by Eureka! Factory, in partnership with the Foundation for Community Driven Innovation, ROBOTICON is a K-12 STEAM education showcase, featuring all four FIRST programs, and academic, engineering and industry exhibits for a weekend long celebration of science and technology. The mission of ROBOTICON is to increase public awareness of and engagement in, the power of hands on, mentor driven youth engineering and robotics programs like FIRST , and to provide participating youth with a low stress, high-quality event with opportunities for skill building, networking, and college and career readiness experiences. When we originally organized ROBOTICON, I was the Regional Director for Central Florida and simply modeled the off-season event on a scaled back version of the Orlando Regional.  We quickly dis...