The FIRST® Robotics Competition (FRC) is the premier engineering challenge for high school students. Teams of students, working closely with teachers and volunteer mentors, have six weeks to conceptualize, design, build, program, modify and test a robot to participate in a competition that changes each year. This year, 31 teams of high school students from the Capital Region, New York state, Brazil, and Canada—along with hundreds of teachers, industry mentors, parents, and 3,000 pounds of metal, gears, and electronics—will test their skills in a unique competition where math, science, and engineering excellence are celebrated. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will once again host the New York Tech Valley FIRST Regional competition, March 15-17, on the Rensselaer campus in the East Campus Athletic Village. The 2018 competition, FIRST POWER UP, finds competition teams trapped in an 8-bit video game. Each three-team alliance has three ways to help defeat the boss: Tipping the scale or the alliance’s switch in their favor to earn points, exchanging power cubes for power-ups (force, boost, and levitate) to gain a temporary advantage during the match, and climbing the scale tower to face the boss. The alliance with the highest score at the end of the match, which includes autonomous and teleoperated periods, defeats the boss and wins the game.