Community & STEM

Outreach

When we started, Portugal had no FIRST® Tech Challenge teams and no FTC events. We decided not to wait for someone else to fix that.

Heroes of the SeaTeam we seeded · #34200

Lisbon ScrimmagePortugal's first FTC event

International Sharing SchoolFull lab day

Six countriesTeams that travelled to Oeiras

School sessionsClassrooms around Oeiras

Two Portuguese teamsSide by side in the pit

Open labCode on the screen, robot on the floor

Drive practiceOn our field, with our mentors

Heroes of the SeaTeam we seeded · #34200

Lisbon ScrimmagePortugal's first FTC event

International Sharing SchoolFull lab day

Six countriesTeams that travelled to Oeiras

School sessionsClassrooms around Oeiras

Two Portuguese teamsSide by side in the pit

Open labCode on the screen, robot on the floor

Drive practiceOn our field, with our mentors

The numbers

Reached

1,400+
FTC teams

FTC teams reached via our social channels, the single biggest driver of everything below.

~25,000Social views across @teamthunderstrike33535 and @ftc.portugal

179Accounts engaged on Instagram, roughly two thirds of them FTC teams

~3,000Individuals reached, counted bottom-up across our social channels

Directly involved

~200
people

Mentored, met, hosted, or run a session with. Smaller than the reach number, and the one we actually care about.

1 teamSeeded from an idea to a competing robot — Heroes of the Sea #34200

3 schoolsInternational Sharing School, St. Dominic's, Oeiras International

6 partnersFIRST® program-delivery partners engaged, including Brazil, Israel and Benelux

Reach is who we contacted. Involved is who we worked with. We keep them apart on purpose — one number is big and true, the other is small and true, and adding them together would make both of them a lie.

Why we show up

A qualifier is one weekend.

A student who decides engineering is for them lasts a lot longer. FIRST® is as much about people as it is about robots, and in a country with no FTC scene there is nobody else to do this part.

So we open the lab. School groups come in, build something that moves, drive it, and ask the questions you can only ask with a robot in front of you.

Everyone who competed, volunteered and watched, at the end of the Lisbon Scrimmage

Saturday 18 July 2026 · TagusPark, Oeiras

We hosted Portugal's
first FTC event

Twelve teams from six countries. Eighty students on the field, three hundred people in the room and eight hundred more on the livestream, run by twenty-three volunteers — almost none of whom had ever worked an FTC event, because almost nobody in Portugal has.

Inside the Lisbon Scrimmage

Teams

From six countries

80+

Students

On the field

300+

In the room

Free entry

800

Watching live

Peak concurrent

What We Do

Students from Heroes of the Sea driving a robot on the practice field in the Thunderstrike lab

New teams

Seeding Teams

We help new Portuguese teams get from "we'd like to try this" to a robot on a field — design choices, funding a kit, printing and assembling parts.

Schools

Lab Days

Full days in our lab: building, wiring, coding and driving a starter bot. Followed up with the coordinators and teachers who can turn it into a team.

Visiting students watching a software walkthrough on a monitor in the Thunderstrike lab

Open lab

Show the Work

Groups sit in on the real thing — CAD on the monitor, code on the screen, the robot on the floor — instead of a tidied-up demo version of it.

Heroes of the Sea students driving their robot at the Thunderstrike lab

Heroes of the Sea · #34200

From nothing to a robot on the field.

A student-led team in Arrentela registered with FIRST® but had no kit, no mentors, and no infrastructure. We hosted them at the lab, helped them settle on a starting robot design, backed them in convincing their school to fund a kit of parts, 3D-printed components for them, and helped assemble the machine.

They competed at the Lisbon Scrimmage — an event we hosted — on a robot we helped them build. That is the part of outreach we care most about.

Open by default

Everything we learn goes back out.

CAD, control code, and our engineering notebook are public, so a team stuck at 2 a.m. has somewhere to look. Our own robot exists because other teams did the same for us.

We also sit on the other side of it: weekly sessions with FRC team GreenBlitz #4590 since September 2025, and a standing line to FIRST® program-delivery partners in Benelux, Brazil and Israel.

If you run a school, a club, or a rookie team and want a hand, get in touch. We travel, we host, and it costs you nothing.

Visiting students working at the Thunderstrike bench with CAD open on the monitor behind them