WPI FIRST Regional
On March 11-13th, 2010 WPI will be hosting a FIRST Regional Tournament featuring 36 teams from all over the Northeast. FIRST is a program designed to inspire high school students to pursue higher education and careers in science, technology, and engineering through hands-on mentorship from people in those fields.
Each team has 6 weeks to build a robot to compete in the same game. They then ship their robots to regional tournaments all over the world to ally and compete with their peers. This will be the first year hosting one of these tournaments at WPI and a crowd of 1000 high school students, their mentors, and families are expected to attend.
These events are free and open to the public of all ages. Teams must sign up to compete through the FIRST Regional registration process in TIMS which opens on 1 October.
A wide variety of volunteer opportunities are available. To sign up, go to the FIRST website to read more about the jobs available and to sign up in VIMS. If you are interested in being part of the Regional Planning Committee, please contact wpirobotics@wpi.edu.
Some of the unique and exciting features of the WPI Regional:
- Team grants to offset travel costs to the event (all teams attending are eligible and strongly encouraged to apply)
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Tournament-unique academic scholarships, including:
- $10,000 WPI Scholarship to one high school senior in attendance on a competing team. To be eligible, you must fill out the scholarship application (to be provided), have already applied for admission to WPI, and meet regular WPI admissions requirements.
- $5,000 SolidWorks/WPI Regional Tournament scholarship to one high school senior in attendance on a competing team. To be eligible, you must fill out the scholarship application (to be provided).
- $2500 WPI Scholarship to each active student on the regional Chairman's Award winning team in celebration of those students' achievements in promoting the goals, mission, and ideals of FIRST.
- Teams may bring in their own food, pre-order boxed lunches, or purchase food on-site
- A minimum of 10 qualifying matches per team
- Discounted hotels within walking distance of the venue
- Shuttle service to all parking areas on campus
- Years of experience running large-scale FIRST-like tournaments
