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FIRST To The Drop
FIRST (painful backronym "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology") is a large robotics education program, operating both in the United States and worldwide, established by Dean Kamen (... yes, the segway guy) and Woody Flowers in 1992.
It's best-known for its FIRST Robotics Competition, where teams of students make large robots that compete in 3v3 matches on a basketball-court sized arena, which has an estimated 90k students, followed by the FIRST Tech Challenge, which focuses on smaller robots competing in 2v2 matches in a 12-foot-square arena, which serves around 90k students.
The youngest segment, FIRST LEGO League, is a bit of an oddball: rather than direct head-to-head competition with a mix of fully autonomous and remote-controlled modes, students complete sets of scored challenges with one robot on a table-sized field at a time. While the kits support Python, almost everyone's stuck in a mediocre Blockly-styled language. FIRST's headline number says 600k+ FLL students, but that blends in some of their other not-quite-robotics applications; the real FLL Challenge number isn't available but probably 500k+. So despite being the youngest program and the least well-known, it reaches far more students than the rest of the program combined, and in an awkward way.
FIRST, correspondingly, has more than its fair share of normal culture war problems. The programs have had a pretty painful see-saw between rewarding actual robotics, programming, and manufacturing on one hand, and giving out blue ribbons for 'community outreach' on the other. There's been several snafus around The Rainbow STEM alliance hitting state politics. Especially at the higher end of the competitions, the different equipment and expertise available to the most well-established teams and the median team are extreme, and then administratively that problem gets described as 'helping underprivileged students'. FIRST renamed the high-profile Chairman's Award into the rather obnoxiously-named Impact Award, which is just after PICO/POCI in terms of missed opportunities, and while a team doesn't have to be optimized for the mainstream press to get anywhere on the Impact Award, it's no coincidence that it happens. There's a very awkward question about FRC events playing the People's Republic of China's anthem before the United States one.
But today I'll bring a more boring one. What happens when you build a major program serving a half-million people, and the hardware doesn't show up?
This didn't come as a bolt from the blue. FIRST Lego League's reliance on a much-bigger company for its entry-level program had been both a source of friction and a massive lost financial opportunity, and the Lego's Group's move from the powerful-if-antique EV3 to the drastically-less-capable Spike Prime was already the writing on the wall that the Mindstorms-style robotic environments weren't going to be long for this world. However, Lego sunsetting the Spike Prime kit only a few years after its initial release, and replacing it with an even-less-apt and even-more-expensive successor named the CS/AI kit, incompatible with the existing tournament style events FLL runs, isn't just a vague problem off in the distance.
Few, if any, extant FLL teams want the new equipment, they want it even less if it's only going to be around a year or two, and they couldn't run any practical game with it if they did. The new kits just can't support multiple robotics payloads in any useful way, and as a result have to run in a completely separate league from the Spike Prime-based kits. Many regions may not run the new equipment's tournaments at all.
And now those teams have 40 days before end of sales. Spare parts will be available til June 2028, and teams can keep using their existing kits, but in two months new teams will be stuck on the secondary and resale markets -- and for many school-based teams, that means not buying at all. Because of the age range and parent buy-in, community teams often come and go as students age in and graduate, and now new teams are facing a hell of a problem when on-boarding.
I've seen speculation that the LEGO-FIRST partnership only collapsed because, between Woody Flower's death on the academic side and Dean Kamen's 'absence' on the business relationship one, FIRST as an organization no longer has the social capability to manage these sort of partnerships. There'd be a very morbid irony if the biggest impact the Epstein Files had was on an educational non-profit, but I'm skeptical. And not just in the sense that Kamen was probably 'just' incredibly unperceptive or showing poor judgement. The financials and business decisions just don't explain enough.
Lego almost certainly was making money hand over fist for those Spike Prime kits: I'd estimate that their material cost is under 50 USD for a kit they sold direct at 400 USD. And, for that matter, making money hand over FIRST, since little if any of the kit money went to the organization running the events. Even including overhead and development costs, the financial incentive of a captive market is serious. But they aren't going to make a new hardware environment just to handle a League Game, because if that was even slightly in the cards, Lego wouldn't be trying to use their new AI/CS kits for the league they're proposing either.
Something has Lego unwilling to support conventional more capable robotics. That's a serious question of its own, and the answers could say a good deal about the broader world: Lego could conceivably be worried about product liability, thinking about optimizing for classroom environments where a lot of the money is, swerving over some bizarre financial or business concern, or building toward a future where computer programming or robotics means less and AI means more. (Though the "AI" part of Lego's new "CS/AI Kit" is just pose detection you could do with OpenCV in 2015.)
But that's unknowable, and moreover, not just a FIRST problem. FIRST's problem is that they've got a year, maybe two, to build an ecosystem from the ground up.
The first obvious answer is finding someone that's already doing this stuff.
Unfortunately, the edutech space is an abomination right now, between high cost of entry (the minimum regulatory price, just in paperwork, to bring a programmable wireless robot to market just in the US is about 20k USD) and the extreme uncertainty in demand and post-sales cost centers. The other big robotics program in the United States is Vex, and Vex's elementary- and AIM program is pretty much remote-control trash. and while their middle-school programs are more serious, they're neither built for nor readily retrofitted toward the sort of competition matches -- either designed for head-to-head bouts in the late middle school range, or with extremely constrained build capabilities even compared to random Legos. Worse, there are some business reasons that Vex and FIRST wouldn't want to partner even if the hardware did work, as Vex competes directly with several FIRST FTC vendors and might want to better position GO or IQ as replacements for FIRST entirely.
FIRST could build something in-house, or with their partners.
It's not looking great, Bob. To be fair, the XRP was almost certainly a grad student school project (I'm hoping not an electrical engineer), and it does have some moderately clever software decisions, and if your BoM is aiming for ~30 bucks at small unit size, you have to compromise somewhere. To be less fair, it's a grad student making worse electrical engineering decisions for a product than I've seen made for one-off youtube shorts. (to be actively uncharitable, if I find whoever keeps selling ultrasonic distance sensors when time-of-flight sensors are right there, I'm putting him in a Saw-style trap). Rev Robotics, that third-party partner that directly competes with Vex, isn't able to keep up with FIRST's demands for their FTC and FRC equipment, has little if any experience in the younger education sector, and their existing control hubs and display hubs are infamous for not surviving heavy use by late middle-schoolers, or even poor travel conditions.
FIRST could hope some new business is going to pull a rabbit out of a hat for them.
Hope's not a plan. There's no RFP for a replacement kit (and FIRST's past RFPs have been pretty badly designed). There's little evidence that they could talk Lego around into keeping older-style kits active longer, and a lot of reason that Lego might not want to be sweet-talked. It's only been a couple months since the news dropped so maybe they're just trying to get started -- but if they only have a year or two, they don't have a lot of months to get moving. It can take two or three months just to get a single manufacturing run with a new ABS-injection mold, and that's assuming you already have the business relationships set up to do it. Anyone considering entering the field, without having some attestation from FIRST, has to know their investment could be cut out from them at any moment, whether because FIRST makes up with Lego, abandons this age range, or just doesn't like the new developer's specific kit. The window for a third party to pop out of the woodwork and target FIRST's specific program needs is tight, and closing, and it doesn't even look that attractive.
I dunno.
If I were in their shoes, building in-house seems the clear least-bad decision: education hardware is a major space to get income with high margins, there's a lot of potential market and inroads for other educational use, and it'd massively derisk the organization from this exact problem. FIRST has tens of thousands of volunteers, hundreds with dedicated hardware design experience, millions of alumni, organizational connections with multiple higher education groups that already do serious software and design work for grad student projects gratis, and enough cash on hand and grants to easily self-fund the development cycle. This could be done well at 2-3 million USD, and done at all around 1 million USD, and the organization did have that money and the people it could ask for grants specifically to do it, and at least from the outside, it wasn't trying. FIRST doesn't have a ton of full-time staff, but this isn't an unusual type of tech to contract out. Regardless of specific industrial capacity, actually owning and directing the product lifecycle is both a possibility and a necessity, as this whole incident spells out.
But if I were in their shoes, I've have done that five years ago. Anyone with eyes could tell you that depending on hardware owned by single third parties was a major problem for the organization. Maybe there were arguments for not doing building in-house for FLL before this year, since the Lego Brand Name was a major selling point. But that's still leaving tens of millions of dollars in kit profit on the table to sweeten the deal for a partner where it wasn't enough. It's also only one of the FIRST programs. The FTC and especially FRC environment in particular has long depended on controllers that never really 'fit' the ecosystem. FRC's RoboRio is a National Instruments product that NI clearly hates to sell and support, and have actively made less robust by reducing the conformal coating and introducing a microSD card slot.
That's been a problem FIRST knew needed to be solved, and it's only in the last two years that they've even started to consider even partial ownership of the actual robotics controller that they're selling their entire programs around. And they started in the hardest environment to do it, trying to replace the gigahertz-speed and (differential-signaling) peripheral-heavy RoboRio rather than the megahertz-speed Spike Prime.
Maybe the teething problems explain the hesitance? FIRST did start working moving the FTC and FRC environments toward gear they had at least a partial ownership in with the SystemCore controller. That settled on a Raspberry PI CM5-based device, mostly Rev Robotic's brainchild, and both much later than the intended timeline and inevitably going to have supply chain issues. That seems like more argument to start fast, with well-circumscribed and specific feature sets, dependent on proven hardware, than not start at all.
FIRST has risked tens of millions of dollars in program revenue, and the program as a whole, on hardware that they didn't control and couldn't guarantee would remain available. The end result is a worldwide program, with hundreds of thousands of interested students and tens of thousands of volunteers, that's just driving unpiloted toward an oncoming cliff. Which makes for an especially awkward metaphor in a robotics context.
I don't pretend to know all the intricacies here, but IME school robotics competitions are mostly used by UMC strivers to pad their kids' college resumes (the earlier they get funnelled into this the better), complete with parents "helping out" in the class to get their kids favors from the teacher.
Inshallah this whole edifice will be plowed under and the earth salted.
That's fair, and it (along with the grant/scholarship ecosystem) are a serious frustration with these programs.
But there is a separation between the telos and the day-to-day work: even for students that are only getting involved to fill out their college resume, they at least have the opportunity to learn more. I've had students go into the program unfamiliar with the "plus" and "minus" screwdrivers, and come out knowing how to safely use a lathe; start without the ability to read basic Java assignment, and leave building a command scheduler library; to begin with a wire management scheme of 'rat's nest', and grow to something that's not horrifying; to start a stuttering mess and grow to actually give a confident presentation.
My bigger criticism of the programs are how poorly they play into some portions of that: the program designs make it very hard to justify teaching soldering, or electrical engineering, or good CAD principles, or serious ground-up manufacturing, even off-season. ((to be fair, because it's hard to find the mentor expertise. I can't CAD worth shit. Finding anyone who can run a hot air rework station and volunteer six hours a week is a pretty hefty lift.))
The Lego stuff has always been at the less productive end of that. You can teach basic programming with it even if the EV3 did a little better, and there is a public speaking and product development bit even if it's never been very realistic, but the design and problem-solving sides have always felt a little too much like encouraging students to solve by exhaustion rather than learning.
But it's noteworthy that Lego seems to be pulling toward the UMC strivers, that FIRST decided to nope out. It's even more noteworthy that result seems destructive toward FIRST, rather than anyone else, and will only become more so if FIRST doesn't shape up fast, and that they don't seem to have any route to do so in no small part because of the skills development segments that they've missed.
Sorry about all that, but I'd still rather see this buried. Maybe we can bring back shop class, or just return a few hours a week to the kids that they can use to go to a maker space rather than grinding legible college app activities.
I don't quite understand. Who is even doing this besides the strivers?
Is FIRST not basically the only game in town?
Anecdote, but there's a decent number who use it to see if their kid actually likes programming or STEM-adjacent stuff since the school programs are garbage and self-driven learning is very hit-or-miss, a smaller number who just insist their kid do something as an after school program to get them out of the house and FIRST is something that's still air-conditioned, and a lot of kids who get into it because it's an in-school program and less dumb than most of the other electives.
The dedicated strivers exist, and they're really obnoxious when you run into one that's made themselves a drive coach, but it's not the only entry point.
No, surprisingly. VEX V5 is the most comparable league to FTC, and it's technically a little larger in terms of just student count. The teams I mentor actually have pretty serious recruitment conflict because it's so much easier to run an 'award-winning' V5 team. FRC is pretty unique in scale, at least until you get into battle-bot style destructive stuff, but that doesn't really show up on the resumes. And there's a bunch of smaller programs like REFC Drone or the National Robotics Competition.
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