FIRST Tech Challenge Preview Event

FIRST^® Tech Challenge dug into DECODE™ presented by RTX two weeks ago at this season’s Preview Event in Flower Mound, Texas. The Preview Event (called the “Week 0” event for FIRST Robotics Competition) is a formal testing ground event for this season’s game and training materials and takes place before any official events have been played. This event wouldn't have been possible without the generous planning and contributions of the FIRST^® in Texas Program Delivery Organization, FIRST in Texas staff, the FIRST Tech Challenge Global Key Volunteers, and the dedicated volunteers in Texas and the surrounding areas that showed up to help make this event an enormous success.

Heading into this event, our goals were to test out the DECODE game in action and to test out the team and volunteer training materials. FIRST^® staff were excited to try new ways to improve event quality and experience through early season testing.

Along with the more tactical lessons, we also really enjoyed some exciting on-field gameplay. We had a great group of teams and some very impressive robots show up for this scrimmage event. It was great to see how DECODE plays with teams who are still learning the strategies and tuning their robots and also seeing teams with advanced level robots. We know there are a lot of scouts and strategists (and a few of our game designers) intently studying the match videos.

Among the field were a few StarterBots. If your team is looking to get started and doesn’t know where to start, make sure to check out our StarterBot resources!

In addition to the on-field lessons learned we want to remind our teams of two other changes this year: 

1. We have made some changes to inspection; there is no longer field inspection! Read more about it in Section 3 of the Competition Manual.

2. Practice matches are awesome, but optional. Read more about Practice Matches in Section 13.5 of the Competition Manual.

Finally, we reviewed the impact of the changes to advancement (described in Section 4 of the Competition Manual) on which teams would have hypothetically advanced from this event. As was the goal of the revised advancement formula, the teams that would have advanced excelled at both the robot and judging aspects of the program. As the season progresses, we will continue to look at advancement data to ensure it aligns with and supports our overall goals.

While this was a scrimmage, here is a snapshot of the hypothetical results:

Moving forward, we are excited to incorporate our lessons learned at the very first Preview Event. Congratulations to all the amazing teams that showed up with working robots and competed. We are also thankful to the Texas area volunteers for running such an excellent event and kicking off and building up the DECODE season!