FIRST Robotics Competition has been a way for our team members to excel in engineering, CAD, business, and leadership. The assistance it has provided for the college acceptance of our alumni is significant and undeniable. Since our start, fifteen of our own team members have been accepted into MIT, and many of the others attend schools including Dartmouth, Georgia Tech (30 to date), Johns Hopkins, Auburn, SCAD, and Mercer. The majority of our alumni have chosen to major in STEM fields such as Mechanical Engineering, Physics, or Computer Science (85% in fact). FIRST Team 4188 has also launched several careers, including internships with Google and SpaceX.

From the mentoring of Boy Scouts, Brownie Scouts, and multiple FIRST Lego League teams, to demonstrating our robot’s abilities at local elementary schools, we have aspired to change the mindset of today’s youth to appreciate STEM and other academic fields in the same way that other areas like sports and entertainment are popular today. We also interested our own peers in STEM through an attendance of over 100 people to our mechanical engineering, CAD, and programming workshops at the start of the season as well as helping to implement advanced placement STEM classes at schools, such as: AP Computer Science, AP Physics C: Mechanics, and AP Physics C: Electricity & Magnetism.