How FIRST Tech Challenge actually works
Part 2 of a series on FIRST competitions. If you haven’t read Part 1 — how I got into this as a volunteer, and why you might want to as well — I’d recommend starting there.
FIRST Tech Challenge is one of three competitions under the FIRST umbrella, all built around the same idea: spread STEM to young people through hands-on robotics. Each year, the three programs share a common theme. This season it’s biodiversity — how species, genes, and ecosystems connect to sustain a natural balance. That theme becomes FLL’s BIOGLOW, FTC’s BIOBUZZ, and FRC’s BIOCORE.
FTC’s season officially kicks off on September 12, when the game details are revealed. This article isn’t a game preview or a build guide — it’s the structural walkthrough I wish someone had handed me before my first event.
FTC targets students aged 12 to 18. A team is typically 7 to 15 members, guided by one or more adult coaches who mentor but don’t build or code for them.
The competition has two sides, and most people only hear about one. The visible side is the robot game: each season a new match is announced, and teams design, build, and program a robot to complete its missions. Unlike FLL’s LEGO-based builds, FTC robots use real structural components — aluminum, steel, screws, belts — and are programmed primarily in Java or Kotlin. More on the robot itself in a moment.
The less visible side is the judged evaluation. Teams document their entire season in an engineering portfolio — up to 15 pages covering their design process, outreach, research, and community impact. Throughout the season, teams are expected to meet with industry experts, engage their community, manage their project using structured methods, and seek sponsorships. They then present this work to a panel of judges, who evaluate them against specific awards: Inspire, Think, Connect, Innovate, Design, Control and Motivate.
Here’s what most newcomers miss: the judged side carries as much weight as the robot game. The robot matters — it just doesn’t decide everything.
A typical FTC season follows roughly the same rhythm every year.
Not every country runs the same path. Some have multiple qualifying rounds and a national stage before an international championship; others go straight from regionals. In Morocco, Loop organizes the pipeline as FIRST’s regional partner.
Zooming in on what a competition day looks like for a team.
At the beginning of the tournament, teams are randomly grouped into two-on-two alliances. Each alliance faces another in a timed match. To make this concrete, take last season’s game — DECODE — whose main objective was scoring balls into designated zones, with bonus points for actions like returning to the base on endgame. The missions change every year, but the match structure stays the same.
Each match opens with a short autonomous period — the robot runs entirely on pre-programmed movements, no human input. Then drivers take over using gamepads, controlling a robot whose every button mapping they programmed themselves. This is where strategy starts to matter. Some alliances split roles between offense and defense, others double down on scoring from different zones — it depends on the game and the partner. Teams figure this out in the minutes before a match, often with an alliance partner they’ve just met.
When time runs out, the scores are tallied — points from missions, bonuses for endgame actions, minus any penalties. The alliance with more points takes the match.
After qualification rounds, rankings are calculated from cumulative scores. Then comes alliance selection: the top-ranked teams become captains and choose their partners for the elimination bracket. This is where the social layer kicks in — a team that performed well but also proved reliable as a partner gets picked. One that scored high but played selfishly might not.
In parallel with the matches, teams go through a judging process — and for many awards, this matters more than the scoreboard.
It starts with a presentation. Each team stands in front of a panel of judges and walks through their season: how they designed and iterated on their robot, how they organized their work, which experts they consulted, what events they ran, and how they secured sponsorships. The engineering portfolio is handed over for the judges to review alongside the presentation.
The awards are structured in tiers. At the base sit two families: one covering the technical side — how the team brainstormed, designed, built, and controlled the robot — and one covering the team itself: how they grew their skills, built something sustainable, and spread FIRST in their community. The Think Award sits alongside them, recognizing the quality of the portfolio and how well a team documents its own process.
Above all of them is Inspire. It goes to the team that performs across every category at once — technical work, team development, and documentation. It’s the highest award a team can win, and in most regions it advances you further than winning matches does.
After the interviews come the pit visits. A quick note on pits: every team has a designated area where they store their robot, prepare between matches, and set up displays that reflect their identity and culture. Teams visit each other’s pits throughout the day to exchange ideas, share techniques, and connect — it’s one of the most organic parts of the event. During pit visits, judges drop by specific teams to dig deeper into something from the interview or observe how the team works together in practice.
One thing that sets FIRST apart from most competitions: core values are not a side note — they’re scored. How teams treat each other, how they share knowledge, how they handle losing a match. If a judge observes serious misconduct — a team yelling at opponents, for example — it can cost them an award entirely.
Adding this small paragraph to give you a sense of what the robot side looks like in practice. A deeper technical breakdown of robot design deserves its own article that I may share later. Let’s take the example from the DECODE season — last year’s game. The objective was straightforward on paper: collect ball-shaped game pieces from the field and launch them into designated scoring zones. Simple enough, until you realize every subsystem is a design problem on its own.
How do you pick up the balls? That’s the intake — and teams have to decide between rubber bands, compliant wheels, boot wheels, each with different trade-offs in grip, speed, and reliability. How do you move them to the launcher? That’s the transfer — arm-based, ramp-based, gravity-fed, each with its own failure points. How do you actually score? That’s the shooter — and now you’re deep into motor selection, gear ratios, and projectile physics to figure out the right RPM for consistent accuracy from different positions on the field.
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Every team solves these problems differently, and the engineering portfolio documents each decision: why they chose one approach over another, what broke during testing, what they iterated on, and what they learned. Below are a few pages from a real portfolio to give you an idea of what that process looks like.
Before wrapping up, I wanted to let other voices in. I reached out to people I’ve met through these events — students, coaches, volunteers, organizers from different countries — and asked them to share one thing that stayed with them.
A participant remembers the moment it clicked:
A specific memory that I will never forget in relation to my FTC experience is our qualification for the International Eurasian Championship in Istanbul. Being qualified for the championship was a great honor; however, what was amazing about it was the opportunity to meet teams from various countries and backgrounds. Even though there were many differences between us, it was easy to bond because we all loved robotics. We shared our knowledge, helped each other in solving our problems, and competed at the same time. What was particularly great for me was to work with other teams while competing against them.
— Mohamed Rayane Lamrani Alaoui, member of 3andi Blasti team, Morocco
On what makes coaching harder than just building a robot:
The hardest part of coaching has nothing to do with the technical side — it’s everything around it. Getting a dozen young people who don’t know each other, don’t share the same interests, and have never worked as a team to rally behind a common goal.
What makes it harder is that these are brilliant kids who excel in school — but school taught them the opposite of teamwork. It rewards individual performance, competition, making the other person lose so you succeed. Reversing that mindset is a real challenge. Getting veterans to mentor newcomers, to share knowledge willingly — that’s foreign to them. And for the technically strongest members, learning to be patient when others move slower, understanding that a team doesn’t move faster but it moves further.
The other difficulty is getting them to leave their comfort zone. In school, there’s a curriculum, a teacher with all the answers. In competition, nobody knows the destination. You hit problems and you solve them — through trial and error, through imperfect attempts that you improve on, through improvising when things go sideways. Not by overthinking, not by waiting for the perfect first try.
These are skills they’ll carry for the rest of their lives — at work, in relationships, in whatever path they choose.
— Fatima-Zahra Benyaaqoub, coach of 3andi Blasti team, Morocco
A judge advisor on what keeps her coming back:
I started volunteering because I wanted to contribute to young people discovering how much fun technology can be. What I didn’t expect was how often students would surprise me with the ideas they come up with themselves — using all kinds of sources, experimenting and turning those ideas into something that actually works. Not just technical or strategic solutions, but also ideas for community outreach, making their team sustainable and helping other teams.
One of the things I find most rewarding is seeing how much more there is to a team than the robot itself. From an observer’s perspective, it is fascinating to listen, ask questions and see what teams choose to share with us. And it often blows me away.
Then there is the personal growth. During a season, you see students becoming more confident, learning to work together, putting themselves in someone else’s shoes and taking responsibility. Over multiple seasons, it is even more special to see teams and participants return, take on new challenges, become mentors or volunteers themselves, or simply grow into more confident people.
The coaches and mentors deserve a lot of credit for creating an environment where this can happen. It takes a real “hands-off” mentality to give students the space to learn for themselves rather than simply following instructions. As a volunteer, I can recognise and encourage those qualities from the sidelines.
Seeing Coopertition and Gracious Professionalism go hand in hand makes it even more special. There is real competition on the field, but also a strong community in the pits and throughout the building season. Teams compete against each other while sharing knowledge, helping solve problems and celebrating each other’s successes.
As a Judge Advisor, I get to experience this from yet another angle — helping judges through the inevitable competition-day chaos and making sure teams get a fair chance to tell their story.
And then there is the wonderful community of volunteers and participants. They are genuinely great people to share your spare time with.
That combination keeps me coming back. And it is incredibly addictive.
— Bianca Eckert, judge advisor, FTC European Premier Event
Hosting an international event for the first time:
Honestly, it’s an incredible feeling. Seeing teams from dozens of countries walk into the FIRST Tech Challenge Premier Event 2026 in Eindhoven — an event I’ve spent months planning and building — is one of those moments where everything suddenly becomes real. I realize that all the late nights, details, logistics and problem-solving were ultimately about creating a place where students from around the world could come together, compete, learn and have an amazing time. It’s incredibly rewarding and honestly quite surreal!
One thing nobody warned me about when hosting an international event? The scale of the human side of it. I (together with my collegues of STEAMup) am not just hosting teams we’re bringing together dozens of cultures, languages, expectations and stories. And somehow, in the middle of all that complexity, we get to witness complete strangers connect over robots. 🤖🌍
That’s probably my favorite part: realizing that what I organized is much bigger than the event itself. We’re creating memories and connections that can last far beyond the competition.
And seeing all of that come together in Eindhoven? Absolutely unforgettable. 🇳🇱❤️
— Nicolle Visschers, STEAMup, organizer of the FTC European Premier Event, Eindhoven
PS: If you want to get involved — as a participant or a volunteer — the easiest starting point is your country’s FIRST partner. In Morocco, that’s Loop for Science and Technology. For volunteering specifically, keep an eye on their channels: a sign-up form goes out whenever an event needs volunteers.
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