"To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated

and where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes."

Dean Kamen, Founder

Dean Kamen founded FIRST in 1989 with the hope of getting students involved in science, technology, engineering and mathematics through gracious professionalism. His mission has spread to over 150,000 students across the globe. Every year through a global webcast, FIRST announces a game that the teams must design and program a robot to play. The game has varied from manipulating moon rocks on a zero gravity playing field to the current game of playing soccer with five other robots. Through the process of designing, building, programming and competing with a student-driven robot, students learn the valuable skills they will need in any career, engineering or otherwise.

Team 1296 was founded in 2004 at Rockwall High School. Bruce Charbonneau has been with us since day one along with our wonderful mentor Keith Buchanan. These and many other parent and teacher mentors have worked with our team over the years to make us into the close-knit team we are today. In 2004, the Full Metal Jackets competed in the Chicago regional where we were awarded the Rookie Inspiration award. The following three years, we competed in the Houston regional. In 2008, Rockwall Robotics was able to compete in both the Colorado regional and Nationals in Atlanta as we were on the winning alliance at regional. Last year, we competed in the first Dallas regional where we will compete again this year. Over the years, Team 1296 has won awards for website excellence, autodesk visualization, and the team spirit award. Also, our mentor Rick Fox won the Woodie Flowers award. Our team is divided into five main components: robot construction, non-robot construction, programming, technology and public relations. Through our separate yet interlaced departments, we are able to accomplish the overwhelming task of building a working piece of technology in six weeks in addition to designing 3D animation of our robot, presenting an award to a panel of judges, and pulling together a website.