By Alex Bryant | President
Adelaide started with LEGO bricks. At nine years old, she joined one of the 100 new FIRST LEGO League Explore teams we launched across Maryland this past year—her first exposure to engineering concepts, her first time working on a team to solve a real-world problem. She built a model addressing energy efficiency in her community, presented her research to judges, and discovered something powerful: she could design solutions to problems she cared about.
That discovery is the foundation of everything we do. This season, you funded the complete pathway Adelaide and thousands of students like her will follow—from elementary exploration through high school leadership and into STEM careers. Your investment built the infrastructure that makes that journey possible across four states and every level of K-12 education.
By middle school, students like Adelaide advance to FIRST Tech Challenge, where the stakes and complexity escalate dramatically. Right now, we're in the final weekend of our FTC Qualifier season, where 287 teams have been competing for a chance to attend our 96-team Chesapeake Championship on February 7-8 in Doswell, Virginia. That Championship will be one of the largest FTC competitions in the world, bringing together the region's strongest teams for alliance-based matches where students deploy thousands of lines of code, custom-machined components, and strategic gameplay they've refined over months of iteration. These middle schoolers aren't just building robots—they're developing the project management skills, technical documentation capabilities, and presentation experience that prepare them for high school engineering and beyond.
The culmination arrives in high school with FIRST Robotics Competition, where students engineer 120-pound robots in six-week build sprints that mirror real industry timelines. This season we're preparing to launch 120 FRC teams into competition—our strongest roster yet and a clear signal that post-pandemic recovery has turned into sustained growth. These teams benefit from expanded support infrastructure you're funding, including our new virtual coach chat sessions for both FTC and FRC. These sessions, led by our Team Advisory Committees, lower the barriers for new mentors stepping into coaching roles for the first time. When experienced coaches provide real-time guidance during the most challenging phases of the season, rookie teams survive their first year and return stronger. That mentor-to-mentor knowledge transfer is how we've achieved retention rates above 90 percent in our Geared Up cohorts—and it's how we're building the capacity to serve even more students in the years ahead.
Adelaide's journey doesn't end at graduation. Longitudinal research tracking FIRST alumni over ten years shows that 83 percent major in STEM fields—more than double the national average—and 61 percent specifically pursue engineering or computer science. Female FIRST alumni are 3.7 times more likely to major in computer science than their peers and report significantly higher early-career salaries. The students you're supporting this season will become the engineers solving climate challenges, the computer scientists building ethical AI systems, the manufacturing innovators creating domestic production capacity, and the mentors who return to guide the next cohort. In June, the elite among them will compete at our newly rebranded Multinational Tech Invitational, where 40 of the world's top FTC teams gather at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory for a competition that connects students directly with aerospace engineers, university recruiters, and industry leaders. Your investment compounds across decades.
From LEGO bricks to leadership roles on the global stage—that's the arc you're funding. Every elementary student who discovers she loves problem-solving, every middle schooler who realizes he can code, every high schooler who presents technical work to NASA scientists and recognizes she belongs in engineering spaces—those moments of recognition create the STEM workforce our region desperately needs. You're not funding a program. You're funding the infrastructure that transforms curiosity into capability, and capability into careers that build the future.
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By Alex Bryant | President
By Alex Bryant | Executive Director
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