The 2025-2026 First Tech Challenge (FTC) season kicked off on Sept. 6. 10 Milwaukee area teams gathered at Homestead to start their build for the annual Robot in 30 Hours Challenge.
Robot in 30 Hours is hosted and live-streamed with the intention of inspiring other teams. It is also an event that brings exposure to the Homestead Robotics Program and FTC in general.
Aurko Ghose, senior, elaborated on the impact of Robot in 30 Hours for the robotics community, as he said, “We have a unique opportunity as we start the season before other people. There’s like hundreds or thousands of people that kind of like watch what we’re doing as a way to guide their season. I feel like that ability to reach a lot of people that I wouldn’t otherwise been able to is something that I am grateful for and I enjoy very much.”
As teams move through their other season qualifier tournaments, leading up to the state championship in March, robots will often get modified and strategies are changed based on experience; however, during the Robot in 30 Hours build, teams must innovate with a time constraint.
Gabby Passey, senior, has participated in three Robot in 30 Hours events and comments on how the challenge kickstarts the season. She said, “It forces us to actually build something because we could procrastinate forever, …but it puts a deadline on you. It puts a hard deadline that you have to have something.”
The game manual, posted minutes after the video premier of the challenge, holds all the information about rules, penalties, scoring elements, robot construction, and match ranking. At the beginning of Robot in 30 Hours, some students start reading through the manual, while others entertain different ideas for robot design, all of the work culminating at the end of the event in which matches are held with the participating teams.
The results that stem from Robot in 30 Hours are prototypic builds that teams will base subsequent robots off of.
When asked how Robot in 30 Hours helps set goals for the team, Head Coach Bish Ghose said, “Robot in 30 Hours sets up a blueprint about how things are looking right at the very front of the season and we get some idea, as a team, where the major focus areas should be, and then from there on it’s a divide and conquer. We figure out what areas will be staffed by which team members and a reasonable time frame by which those team members will be able to complete those tasks and then integrate everything together… This understanding comes from participating in Robot in 30 Hours.”
