The 2014 FIRST Robotics Competition season was launched by founder Dean Kamen on Saturday, with the kickoff of a new robotics game called Aerial Assist. A crowd of 400 people at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, N.H., hometown of FIRST headquarters, took part in the event, joined by some 70,000 high-school students on more than 2,700 teams in 92 cities around the globe via live Nasa-TV broadcast and webcast.

Aerial Assist, is played by two alliances of three teams each. Alliances compete by trying to score as many balls in goals as possible during a two-minute and 30-second match. Working with adult mentors, students have six weeks to design, build, program, and test their robots to meet the engineering challenge. Once these young inventors build a robot, their teams will participate in one or more of the 98 regional and district competitions. 

[Image courtesy: FIRST]