FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is an organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen in 1989 in order to develop ways to excite students about engineering and technology. The first event was the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), which is designed to inspire high school students to become engineers by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers to develop a robot. The inaugural FIRST Robotics Competition was held in 1992.

Later on, the FIRST LEGO League, a program similar to the FIRST Robotics Competition, was formed. It is aimed at younger students and it utilizes Lego Mind storms sets to build palm-sized robots, rather than the actual person-sized metal robots that the high schoolers in the FRC build. The latest event to be added to FIRST is the FIRST Vex Challenge (started in 2005). It is designed for high school students who don't have the financial, temporal, or other resources for the FIRST Robotics Competition.

FIRST also operates FIRST Place, a facility at FIRST headquarters in Manchester, New Hampshire where FIRST holds educational programs for students and teachers.

The FIRST Robotics Competition is the premiere competition held by FIRST. As of 2006, over 1,125 high school teams totaling over 28,000 students from Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more compete to build 100-125 pound robots that can complete a task that changes every year. Teams are given a standard set of parts and the game details at the beginning of January and are given six weeks to construct a competitive robot that can accomplish the game's task. Teams compete in 33 regional competitions over several weeks in March to try and qualify for the championship event in Atlanta, Georgia in April. Previous years' championships have been held in Houston, Texas and at Walt Disney World's Epcot.

FIRST Robotics' sister organization is the FIRST LEGO League (FLL). FLL is intended to further the same ideals that the FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) does but at a middle school level and utilizing the Lego Mind storms for Schools educational robotics system, including ROBOLAB programming software based on National Instruments' LabView industrial control engineering software. The combination of interchangeable LEGO parts, computer 'bricks' and sensors, and the aforementioned software, provide preteens and teenagers with the capability to build reasonably complex models of real-life robotic systems.

2002's challenge was set in the city. Robots completed tasks such as clearing rocks off a soccer field, harvesting and delivering food loops, collecting toxic barrels, activating a windmill, and other city-related tasks.

2003's challenge was inspired by that year's Mars Rover mission, in that the competing teams had to design and construct robots to solve a number of problems like removing rocks from a 'solar panel' to ensure a Mars base energy supply, collect 'soil/rock samples' from the Martian desert landscape, as well as several additional sub problems.

2004's challenge was centered around various robotic assistant systems for disabled persons, and demonstrated how the systems are (hopefully) able to solve the given problems in a satisfying way.

2005's challenge, "Ocean Odyssey", involved marine-theme tasks such as mapping a sunken ship, deploying a research submarine, and cleaning up a shipping spill.

Once the rules are released, like in the FRC the teams must build and program a robot design. Once they have finalized the design, they must compete in competitions. The first place for competitions is the regional competitions. The top 1-10 from the regional competitions (depending on the area) go on to a larger area competition. The final competition is in Atlanta, Georgia at the Georgia Dome along with the FRC robots

The FIRST Vex Challenge is a mid-level robotics competition announced by FIRST on March 22, 2005. Its first competition was a demonstration competition at the national FIRST competition in Atlanta, GA from April 21-22, 2005.

While most FRC teams are school established in the form of clubs which require fundraiser's to support a multi-thousand dollar price tag, Vex is more public and designed for people that do not wish to join such an expensive and generally school-oriented FRC team. Vex can be built by anyone, and the kit of parts is available at Radio Shack stores for $300 US. Vex Challenge robots are approximately one-third the scale of their FRC counterparts. The Vex robots offer greater control over robot design than FLL through the use of Erector Set style pieces. The Erector set style pieces provide less flexibility than FRC, but provide a transition for students from the FLL competition to the FRC competition.

The VEX Demonstration at the 2005 National Competition featured a 1/3 linear scale mock-up of the 2004 FRC Competition, FIRST Frenzy: Raising the Bar.