I’m not even sure where to start, so I’m just going to dive in….

FIRST Championship Veteran Waitlist Registration and Pre-Qualified Team Registration

These registrations had been scheduled to open this Thursday, 10/27. However, we are still in the process of creating documentation explaining how FIRST Championship Waitlists and location swaps will work. As you can imagine, with two Championship locations and so many potential combinations of qualification, waitlist selection, and swaps, we’ll need ‘lots of words’ and at least one diagram to help teams understand how this will work. While we have been working on this documentation, I’m not confident we’ll have a complete, quality product ready before Registration was scheduled to open Thursday. So, we are postponing both Veteran Waitlist Registration and Pre-Qualified Team Registration to next Thursday, November 3rd, at 3PM Eastern Time . Please note that while the opening date for these Registrations is changing, the closing dates are not.

The good news is that all teams will be able to waitlist for both, either, or neither of the Championship locations. Also, some limited number of teams will be allowed to change the Championship location for which they’ve been registered. This flexibility is driving some of the system complexity I reference above, but we are willing to try a more ‘open’ system for 2017 to see how it goes. We expect to learn a great deal in 2017, and these learnings will be applied in 2018 to make things even better.

We Need Your Help in Recruiting Teams!

Know anyone who is considering starting a new FRC Team? Now is the time for a friendly nudge, so they can start having the same great experience you are! Please send them to the 2017 season landing page for info about the upcoming season and how to start a team. As they will see on the page we have Rookies grants available, but applications close Thursday, November 3rd ! These Rookie grants significantly reduce the registration fees required to start a team.

Do you think they may need more of an incentive to join up? Check it out, this just in – we just surpassed $40 Million in College Scholarships available! Any way you slice it, that’s some serious cabbage, and a great reason for students considering college to get involved.

Downloadable Content (DLC) Pack 2 and Your Chance to be in DLC Pack 3!

FIRST STEAMWORKS DLC Pack 1 has had over 6,000 downloads so far, and this Thursday, October 27th, at 7PM Eastern Time, we’re making DLC Pack 2 available here. More digital goodies for your use and enjoyment.

Special bonus in DLC Pack 2: Hananiah Wilson, graphic designer and mentor for FRC Team 4534, The Wired Wizards, from Wilmington, North Carolina, USA, created a cool steampunk style guide for FRC teams. We were so impressed we decided to include it, with her permission, in the DLC Pack being released this week.

And, Hananiah inspired us to look for other community-created content for DLC Pack 3. So this is your chance to help put the ‘A’ in STEAM! We’d love to include other helpful, hip, and happenin’ community-created content in the next pack. The content could be just about anything, from art, to print n play games*, to helpful guides like Hananiah’s, but must be relevant to the 2017 FRC season steampunk theme, must be in a format that is downloadable (to keep the ‘downloadable’ in ‘downloadable content’), and must be free of any copyright restrictions. Send your submissions to frcteamadvocate@firstinspires.org by midnight, Eastern Time, Monday, November 28th. File attachments sent to this email can’t be larger than 10MB. If your file is larger than that (though hopefully not too large – remember we need to zip this up and make it available for download) you can send us a link to a file sharing site**. We can’t promise how many submissions (if any) may be included in the pack, but even if your submission does not make the pack, you will have exercised your creativity, which is a good thing!

Speaking of exercising your creativity, check out the remix of the ringtones in DLC Pack 1 with the track Insanity by iNexus, created by Kaiz Akhtar, from FRC Team 4561, TerrorBytes, of Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA. Talk about hyping the HYPE! Nice, work, Kaiz!

And what is it about North Carolina teams, delivering the goods twice in this one blog?

Frank

* It’s a thing

**But please don’t send us any viruses, though, we’ve got enough to do