Henry Will 4: January 2026

Thursday, January 15, 2026

FIRST Robotics

I am volunteering again to help with a FIRST Robotics team.

This time I’m volunteering as a mentor for American Christian School. This is the same school I teach technology to K through 6th grades once a week. The robotics team is for the high school students and is located at another school building.

Important: I hope to update this blog post as more information becomes available.

First Year Challenges

Because this is the first year for this team, it’s a challenge to figure out where to start and how to plan steps.

Because it’s been difficult to figure out the steps and plan a path, I decided to record some of the steps here so hopefully it will help other people who are new to this program like our team is.

I’ll cover some of the following points in sections below:

Understanding how the program works
Reading about the FIRST robotics challenge
Steps to assembling the Robot and getting it working
Links to information about how our team is doing

1. Understanding how the program works
This page has information giving an oveview of the program.

Basically a team needs to be formed: application needs to be filed, coach(es), Mentor(s) and students need to be identified and registered.
Then, on a “reveal” day in January, the challenge for the year is unveiled via online video.
The teams then start work on assembling the robot (mechanical, electronics, software), adding any customizations, practicing and making adjustments.
Then, in March the competitions occur.

2. Reading about the FIRST robotics challenge

Use the link above to explore information about the costs, video animations of the challenge, schedule and more.

3. Steps to assembling the Robot and getting it working

Our team had a difficult time figuring out how to find the steps to get started. It may exist, but we were not able to easily find a roadmap that is already laid out to provide the steps. Here’s some rough ones that we found. I might update this as we find more information.

Scroll way down to expand the "kickoff kit" on the following page. These documents are helpful and important to check that all the parts we should have are received. https://www.firstinspires.org/resources/library/frc/kit-of-parts
The following page mentions the items that need to be purchased that ARE NOT in the kit. This following page also links to an updated list of tools needed and suggested. Important note: this following page also stresses the suggestion to buy a 3D printer for future competitions. https://community.firstinspires.org/2025-kitbot-shopping-list-for-2026
This page seems to be a starting point https://www.firstinspires.org/resources/library/frc/season-materials?view=calendar and links to the following pages

Kit of Parts https://www.firstinspires.org/resources/library/frc/kit-of-parts - has links to the following

Additional game specific assets

Kit of Parts: https://www.firstinspires.org/resources/library/frc/kit-of-parts

Virtual kit
Kickoff kit - this has the Parts lists for the boxes in the kit and links to the following too

This page https://www.firstinspires.org/resources/library/frc/kitbot explains the parts of the mechanical and electrical build and has software information. It links to the following among others:

This document has links to the various assemblies and focuses on the 2026 mechanism for collecting and tossing “FUEL” (actually FUEL is a ball made of plastic). https://firstfrc.blob.core.windows.net/frc2026/KitBot/2026-kitbot-build-instructions.pdf
Page with "CAD, Drawings and software" (see box with this label on the kitbot page above)
“Additional Resources”