FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) is a larger-scale robotics competition for high schoolers. The motivation for kickstarting an FTC program in Rwanda is to give the younger students who participated in FIRST LEGO League (FLL) last year their next step toward becoming engineers. 

For the 2023-24 school year our goal is to start 10 FTC teams, and at the time of writing this (December 2023), 5 secondary schools have been selected: 

The Rwandan FTC teams are competing in the Power Play FTC game this year. They are tasked with picking up cones off of the playing field and scoring them on 25 junctions around the field of various heights. We chose Power Play because it was the game from the previous school year, meaning it was less expensive and significantly easier to obtain the game materials. 

The First FTC Team - Saint André

The first FTC team that we started was at Collège Saint André. Saint André participated in FLL the previous year and had many students who were now too old, so they were in a perfect position to start FTC. 

In our first FTC session with Saint André in October, we brought Team USA’s robot from FIRST Global Challenge (FGC) as a demonstration of the program. We also gave them a presentation about the FTC program, and showed them example gameplay and robots. They were very enthusiastic and wanted to start a team, so we got to work on preparing them a kit. 

After spending several days of organizing the donations from FIRST Global, we went back to Saint André to bring them their FTC kit and to help them with the first steps of building their robot. They were very motivated and finished their drivetrain assembly much faster than we anticipated, so we set them up to start learning the programming as well. Lastly, we gave them the curriculum we developed and a resources list to follow in case they needed help while we were gone.

Over the next month, we periodically returned to Saint André to help them with any questions they had and to give them feedback on their robot. By December, they had built and programmed a robust multi-jointed arm on their robot to score the cones onto any height junction.

Students at Saint André assembling their drivetrain

Students at Saint André assembling their drivetrain

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Two students at Saint André just after completing their drivetrain
Students at Saint André making modifications to their lift arm design
Students at Saint André adding a hardstop to their arm so that it stays at the correct height to pick up cones

The next 3 teams - Christ-Roi, Maranyundo, and Gashora

Since Saint André had so much success in starting their team, we went through a very similar process to start the next 3 teams at Christ-Roi, Maranyundo, and Gashora. All 3 are secondary schools with FLL experience - Maranyundo placed 1st at the Rwanda FLL national championship the previous year and Christ-Roi placed 3rd, and Christ-Roi also went on to win a prize at an international competition in Morocco.

We brought them the USA FGC robot to demonstrate, gave them a rundown of the program, and showed them example robots and explained how they were made. Finally, we helped them through building the first parts of their robot and left them with a curriculum to follow once we left.

Giving an overview of FTC to Christ-Roi

Giving an overview of FTC to the students at Christ-Roi

Parts Donations from the FTC Community

The primary obstacle to starting FTC teams is getting them the necessary materials. The REV FTC kit and required electronics cost a total of $1200, for a total of $12,000 for 10 teams. To help with this large cost, we organized several large donations from the 2023 FIRST Global Challenge competition in Singapore which you can read about in a prior blog post. 

We also put out a notice on an FTC community discord server to see if any teams would be willing to donate parts to the Rwandan FTC program. FTC 18619 - BuccaNEERS got back to us and said they were willing to donate a large quantity of extra parts as well as most of a Power Play field. By the end of November, the parts were in Rwanda! Over the next 2 weeks, we organized the donation and distributed many of the parts to the existing FTC teams, and saved many of the parts for future teams.

Instagram Updates

You can follow STEM Inspires, the non-profit with whom I am volunteering, for ongoing updates on our outreach in Rwanda. Here's a list of previous posts specifically related to FIRST Tech Challenge:

What's Next

We will continue to start and mentor new FTC teams through early 2024, and in March our goal is to have 10 FTC teams ready to participate in a showcase competition at the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) national championship. Since the FLL program has been so successful in Rwanda, our hope is that this showcase will help convince the Rwandan government to put resources into the FTC program for future years. 

Robotics and STEM Outreach in Rwanda