So your wondering what #frc is?
This blog post is intended for those who have stumbled upon the #FRC hash tag on Twitter. Hopefully after reading this post you will know a little more about one of the most exciting and engaging programs giving young people a chance to get involved with science and technology.
So here goes…
At the beginning of the 2009 season, there wasn’t a lot of F.I.R.S.T. activity on twitter, however the active and growing community adopted the #frc hash tag as a way of tagging their posts related to the competition. Quickly the idea came that if they used the tag enough it would allow the site to gain notice on sites such as hashtags.org and other twitter trend tracking sites, which in turn would cause people to investigate #frc, and hopefully help spread the message of F.I.R.S.T., thus this blog posting.
#FRC is the hash tag for the F.I.R.S.T. Robotics Competition. F.I.R.S.T. was founded by Dean Kamen (Yeah that Dean Kamen, the denim wearing new englander who invented the Segway amongst other things) to help inspire young people to get involved with Science and Technology, or as he said it “To get to meet and work with the Michael Jordans of Science and Technology”. F.I.R.S.T. brings young people, professional engineers, teachers, and volunteers together through the use of a robotics competition that is both exciting and engaging. If you’d like to learn more about the FRC program I recommend you check out the F.I.R.S.T. website(http://www.usfirst.org ). You can also watch streaming coverage of some of the regionals online through NASA’s website, or on NASA-TV, and further coverage is available on ustream.
Here is some more information about the current hash tag shenanigans going on with Twitter.
Currently we are in week one of the FRC competition season. This year to add new interactivity to the competitions, the company responsible for the Field Management Software(FMS) has added twitter integration to the system so that you actually can get real time scores and match results from the scoring system.
Each regional competition has its own twitter feed so you can follow the stream in real time using twitter search, rss reader, or other twitter client. There is also a master account which seems to show all the results in one giant stream of data. Another great tool is the FRC-Spy page put together by Brandon Martus for Chiefdelphi.com this allows you to watch in real time the results from all the regional competitions. You can also follow event specific hash tags, more information is available on chiefdelphi.com.
Further reading about F.I.R.S.T.:
FIRST Official Website
Chiefdelphi
The Blue Alliance
FIRSTwiki
UPDATE
Since posting this, its come to my attention that we have achieved part of our goal and made it onto the front page of hashtags.org! I was so excited I tweeted myself.