Our Ann Arbor based rookie team of middle school students learned to design and build a robot for competing in the First Tech Challenge robotics competition. Our team (#30444) competed in FTC in Michigan in 2025/2026. In each competition we compete against, but also collaborate with, many other teams.
On Nov. 8th, we competed in the Midland Great Lakes Bay Region Qualifier, where we won FIRST's Inspire Award, taking first place in the competition. We were also part of the Michigan South Central Robotics league, and competed in 4 days of game competition followed by a second qualifier tournament. At our second qualifier, we won the Inspire Award again!
Because of our win in Midland, we advanced to the States Northwest competition in Muskegon in December 2025. At States, we won the first place Innovate Award! The Innovate award was a major achievement for our rookie team. We plan to compete in additional off-season FTC competitions in winter/spring 2026.
We will also compete in the SeaPerch Michigan Regional Competition. As part of SeaPerch, we will design, build, test, and compete with an underwater remotely operated vehicle (ROV)!
Our team is open publishing our designs, notebook, and build process. Find our design information and related links here.
In FTC we build a robot to score points in games where the rules change each year. The theme of the upcoming 2025/2026 FIRST competition is First Age, with the competitions themed around archaeology. The FTC challenge will be called Decode; the rules were released on September 6th. Find out more about this year's game at https://ftc.game/. In FTC, points are scored by accomplishing autonomous and driver-controlled objectives (like putting blocks into scoring boxes, throwing balls into goals, parking in a specific location, or having the robot climb scaffolding).
But it’s not only about competing with the robot! We also make reports to describe our robot and our team, and give presentations to panels of judges. We learn to run a small business, including managing a budget and fund-raising so that we can pay for competition registrations and new robot parts.
We also participate in outreach events like talking about robotics at the Washtenaw Elementary Science Olympiad, WESO! All this takes many resources. Consider helping us, including by sponsoring our team.
The practice following the team's success in winning the Inspire Award in Midland (and qualifying for the State competition!), the team took advance of an early snowfall to build a replica robot from a material they had previously overlooked. Unfortunately, as head coach I had…
Continue reading...A huge thank you to FTC team 19250 for their help at the GLBR qualifier on Nov 8! On the night before the competition, a critical 3D printed part of our robot (the elbow of our artifact lift arm) snapped. We tried to fix it…
Continue reading...We had a great time at the Greenhills league competition. We worked on the robot right until the competition started, including adding newly printed wheel covers and tuning the ball lifter. Unfortunately, the ball lifter linear servo hit the ball selector, and the ball selector…
Continue reading...Because of the Nov 4 election, Ann Arbor schools were closed. So our team had a great afternoon practice at Tech Workshop. We set up PedroPathing, tuned our robot (which weighs 30 pounds!), replaced a servo that had broken, and learned how to use Pedro…
Continue reading...Present today: Daphne & Mezel Daily Work Plan (9/27/2025): As part of our robot, we really want to include a ball sorter. That should allow a quick intake to pull in balls and then choose specific artifact colors for scoring patterns even in auto! A…
Continue reading...