Abstract

Since the founding of US FIRST in 1989, there has been a consistent impetus to find new areas of growth to expand FIRST's message of inspiration and recognition of science and technology in the K-12 educational market. As with the FIRST Robotics Competition in 1992, the FIRST LEGO League in 1999, and the FIRST Tech Challenge in 2005, the FIRST Virtual Challenge intends to use the 5thGear simulator, designed and programmed by software engineers at Lockheed Martin, to expand their message and impact to any student with access to a computer. The scope of the FIRST Virtual Challenge project is to ascertain and make recommendations on the best methods, competition models, and areas of improvement in the 5thGear simulator necessary for final recommendations on the implementation and wide-scale use and adoption of the FIRST Virtual Challenge. These recommendations are made based upon extensive background research and thorough demonstrations and testing of possible competition options within a portion of the target audience at select FIRST and FIRST-related events. The final recommendations for this project based upon the outcome of the research and studies involve around use of the 5thGear simulator in an auxiliary competition on Thursday at FRC Regional and Championship Event, use of the simulator internally inside FIRST for game design and animation uses, use for recruiting, marketing, and outreach by teams, use for driver training by teams, and use for strategy planning by teams. Use of the simulator as a design tool to aid in the conception and testing of ideas is not feasible at this time due to software and hardware limitations.

Complete report:

• Final report (pdf)