FIRST Technology Challenge

Congratulations!  Every FTC season is part sprint and part marathon.  Milestones like the game announcement, Kickoff weekend, and of course World Championship, are mainly sprints with hundreds of moving parts.  String enough sprints together, with some chances to catch our breath in between, and the season feels like a marathon.  Regardless of the analogy that works for you, we're reaching the end of another successful year. I hope your year has been a good one.  The 2013/2014 season has been filled with great things.  Teams have continued to grow.  We now have about 4,000 FTC teams worldwide, over 3,300 in North America alone.  That represents over 35% annual growth this year.  The implementation of FTC Super-Regional Championship events gave teams more opportunities to compete and improve.  FTC continued to expand options for teams with the MATRIX kit and additional allowed materials.  The results of these changes can ...

Pippin Wallace started volunteering with FTC eight years ago when the program was still in it's infancy.  It wasn't just the robots that kept him coming back though. Pippin Wallace speaks during the 2013 MT FTC Championship Opening Ceremony (photo courtesyof Darren Steiner) "The kids have always embraced the spirit of Coopertition and Gracious Professionalism in the FIRST  events and this is the big reason I've gotten behind the program," said the Oracle cloud software system administrator. Pippin, who started with FIRST  Vex Challenge as a hardware and software inspector in 2006, said he was excited to be involved with anything robotics related, but he had no idea what we was getting himself into.  His first go-round was rewarding and addictive and it wasn't long before he found himself stepping in to lead FTC in Montana as the Affiliate Partner there. As Affiliate Partner, Pippin became responsible for organizing the State Championship and managing team gro...