FIRST Festival of Champions Update
Dear FIRST � Community, What makes a champion? In FIRST �, it means truly embracing our mission and our core values of Gracious Professionalism � and Coopertition � . It means pursuing the spirit of innovation. It means having a passion for using technology and engineering to make the world a better place. As many of you know, in 2017 we expanded FIRST Championship to two locations. Our primary intent was to make the life-changing excitement and inspiration of the FIRST Championship more accessible and affordable to more kids and teams. I�m proud to say we�re moving in that direction: 1,400 teams attended the 2017 FIRST Championship, 500 more than in 2016. Of course, that�s out of more than 50,000 FIRST teams worldwide, so we�re doing this while still providing a very selective level of competition. When we announced the dual FIRST Championship structure, we did not plan to host a culminating event for winning teams from both events. However, based on feedback from the FIRST comm