For the Inspiration & Recognition of Science & Technology is a non-profit that hosts robotics competitions for students across the world, and as a FIRST team, the West High Robotics club, also known as Team 8696 Trobotix, went to Cedar Falls High School on Saturday, Sept. 6 to kick off the 2025-2026 FIRST Tech Challenge season with other FTC teams across Iowa.
In FTC, the game and objectives that the robots play change every season to give teams a fresh challenge, with each season having a unique theme, with this year being archaeology. Before this season’s game was revealed on a livestream, members from various teams met up in seminars to watch presentations on various FTC-related topics, such as robot controls, competition awards and team dynamics between builders and programmers.
At noon, once seminars were over, attending students and coaches met up in the auditorium of the high school to watch the kickoff livestream and see the field in person after the stream. The livestream was presented by staff of FIRST, the non-profit organization that runs FTC, along with winners of the 2024-2025 Dean’s List Award, an award at the world championships that recognizes exceptional students in the program.
This season’s game, “Decode,” has two alliances of two teams, each collecting and shooting five-inch diameter wiffle balls into elevated goals with their robots. During the match, robots have 30 seconds of fully autonomous motion, then two minutes of human-controlled motion. Finally, during the last 20 seconds of the match, the robots can park themselves in an 18-inch square to score additional points, with the challenge being that robots are also constrained to 18 inches, so one alliance partner has to go on top of the other to fully fit both robots in the square.
The first matches in Iowa will be played in the Solon Scrimmage on Oct. 10, so Iowan teams will have approximately a month to build, program and test their robots before then.
