02/22/2026
As expected, FTC Robotics Season 2025/26 “Decode” came to an end for our team yesterday at our Arizona State Championships. We came in as 20th out of 25 in our division, narrowly meeting our revised goal of not finishing last. Despite some avoidable mishaps, and despite one cannon being held only by zip ties and duct tape at the end, I actually think of yesterday as the team’s best showing of the season.
There were a few things we didn’t manage - our autonomous program only ever “sort of" worked, with some failure modes still unexplained, and in January we had to realize that building an intake was too big a task to bite off - but these mostly seventh-graders have come quite far. A selection of things they/we learned this season:
Nuts and bolts, wheels and hubs and axles
“Lefty loose, righty tighty”
Force and torque, and how to trade speed for torque
The appropriate tools - nut drivers, Allen keys, Dremels, 3D printing
The robot components - DC motors, servos, cameras, odometry pods
Making a cannon out of PVC pipe and compliant (i.e. soft) wheels
Control loops and PIDF
Optical odometry (and when it fails)
The rules of robot construction
The rules of the “Decode” game
How to operate the robot to play the game
How matches work
How tournaments work
How the state championship works
Fundraising
Gracious Professionalism
It’s the kind of list that, if you hold it up in front of students at the beginning of the season, they would doubt they could ever comprehend. Yet learn they did, and mostly they had fun doing it! They will forget some of it, that’s ok, they will learn it again next year.
The kids had a goal of making it to State, and we accomplished that. A combination of luck (3 high-performing teams from Mexico coming to our first competition, winning all, teaming with us often, picking us for the play-offs, and then not needing advancement slots) and strategy (show up with a working mechanism and autonomous routine early) made that possible. It’s a fine goal to have every year, but I’ll modify it to say “deserve to be at State every season”. Next year will be a bit harder as I will step back a bit and have the students do more design work - their own 3D-printed parts etc. And in general, we need to have a conversation of appropriate expectations - to be a competitive team in our region, students need to both spend more time and use it more wisely. We will reject goals that are not in line with the effort the students commit to. These kids are technically too young for FTC robotics - we acknowledged that from the start - and we want to make sure they grow into it at a pace at which they (and their parents!) are comfortable. It’s a fine thing to continue as we did, with modest time budget, but it will not be competitive.
Now we get to make some decisions - who is committed to being around next year? Does it make sense to transform our 501(c)(7) into a 501(c)(3)? Do we want to have a post-season? Where would we meet? Can we afford to rent space?
We will meet with the students again on Monday March 2nd to conduct a proper postmortem review of our season and see where their heads are at. And to dismantle the field and give our co-coach Priscilla her garage back.
I want to close by saying a heart-felt “Thank you!” to all parents, grand-parents, step-parents, everybody who helped and cheered and transported, our generous sponsors, and especially my co-coach Ms. Priscilla who is new to both competitive robotics and herding 7th-graders, but still offered up her time, her home and her garage to a hyperactive bunch of middle-schoolers, so we could have a field. None of this would have been possible without all of you.
I hope we will look back on this in a decade and realize it was the kernel of a new wave of STEM education in Sedona.
Gunnar Mein
Head Coach
FTC Team 24431 Sedona Scorpions
