The Program · Ages 12–18

What is FTC?

The FIRST® Tech Challenge is a global robotics program for students. With their mentors, teams design, build, and program a robot for a brand-new game every September — and along the way pick up the skills, confidence, and friendships that outlast any single season.

Why It Matters

It's not really
about the robot.

The robot is the hook. What students actually leave with is how to solve a hard problem, work as a team, speak up for their ideas, and keep going when the first design doesn't work. That's the part that lasts.

FIRST®, Around the World

Students in FIRST® Tech Challenge

109,000+

◎

Countries competing

80+

◍

Of alumni major in engineering or CS

61%

▲

In scholarships opportunities

$80M+

★

The Game

A new challenge every September.

Each season FIRST® sets a brand-new game and every team in the world gets the same problem to solve. This season's is called DECODE: two robots a side, red against blue, and the floor scattered with hollow plastic balls called artifacts.

You score by launching artifacts into your alliance's goal. Find them, collect them off the floor, carry them, shoot them across the field. The first thirty seconds the robots play entirely on their own; then two drivers take over for two minutes.

Teams get a few months to design and build a machine that can do it, inside a strict size limit and a rulebook that changes every year.

A competition robot in the pits at the Lisbon Scrimmage

A team collecting an award together at the Lisbon Scrimmage

Off the Field

Run it like a team.

A season is more than match play. Teams raise their own funding, build a brand, keep an engineering portfolio, and present their whole process to judges — who hand out awards for the thinking behind the build, not just the score.

Marketing, writing, public speaking, project management. There's a job here for nearly everyone.

What You Walk Away With

Skills that outlast the season

Thunderstrike hands-on with the robot in the pit

Engineering

STEM, For Real

Real engineering, aimed at a real problem with a real deadline — not an exercise with a right answer at the back of the book.

Together

Teamwork

Split the work, trust your teammates, and ship something none of you could build alone.

Thunderstrike's drive team at the controls

Grit

Confidence

Present to judges, drive under pressure, recover from a failure mid-match — and grow from it.

Open To All

You don't need experience.

Nobody arrives knowing how to do this. The best teams are a mix — coders, writers and designers, first-timers and veterans — learning from each other as they go.

Curiosity and showing up are the only prerequisites. We teach the rest.

Students from International Sharing School building a robot on an open lab day

The Culture

Gracious Professionalism®

Compete as hard as you can, and treat everyone — teammates and rivals — with respect. Both, at the same time.

Coopertition®

Help the teams you're up against, even while you're trying to beat them. Lend the spare motor. Share what you learned.

After the Buzzer

A head start on
what comes next.

FIRST® connects students to scholarships and to a worldwide alumni network. Most go on to study and work in engineering, computing, and science — carrying the habits they built here into whatever they do.

Curious? Come build.

Thunderstrike is Portugal's first FTC team — and we're always looking for the next teammate.

Apply to join → See our robot