FIRST® Choice and Virtual Kit Open
Round 1 of FIRST® Choice opened today Thursday, November 17, at Noon Eastern Time and closes Thursday, December 1. The lead mentor 1 or 2 from a secured or event registered team may peruse FIRST Choice, populate Priority Lists, and prioritize items for Round 1 (but orders are only processed for teams that have secured registration payment by Noon ET on December 1, 2022). More information is available on the Kit of Parts page including this helpful video!
The 2023 Virtual Kit of Parts is also now live for secured teams. Teams that haven’t secured payment yet will see the voucher codes populated on the “Password/Voucher Code” section of the Dashboard for lead mentors 1 and 2 once payment is secured. The details and instructions are posted in the Virtual Kit section of the Kit of Parts webpage.
2023 China Regional
We have made the difficult decision to not host an official FIRST® Robotics Competition event in China in 2023. We did not want to take registration payments from teams in China when we did not feel confident in our ability to host an event and give the teams the full program experience there.
Update to Bumper Rules
Following the publishing of the recent blog on robot rule changes we have heard a lot of feedback on the change to pool noodle sizing for bumpers. The main reason for the original change was to allow teams to utilize 2.5” pool noodles that do not have a marketed diameter. Before releasing this change, we researched pool noodles we had access to and saw that the ones we had fell within this range. Unfortunately, that was not the case for all pool noodles marketed as 2.5”. With this new information, we are modifying R408 to clarify that 2 ½ in. (63mm) pool noodles are pool noodles sold as 2 ½ in. (~63mm) diameter or that measure between 2 ¼ in. (~57mm) and 2 ¾ in. (~70mm).