Robolyst Robolyst

Kickoff · FIRST Tech Challenge 2026–2027 · Saturday, September 12

08 days
23 hrs
50 min
35 sec

The game drops in 8 days. Start your season the same day.

Watch the reveal, get the manual the second it publishes, and walk out of the weekend with a real task board, a budget and your first notebook entry.

Watch the reveal Find your qualifier
13,295 Teams registered
336 Events scheduled
24,368 Teams indexed
191,068 Matches on record
Reveal day

Stream, manual and calculator on one page

Not built yet

Scoring calculator

Set the game pieces, get the score. Compare two strategies and find the points per cycle you actually need. We build it against the real manual, so it cannot exist before the reveal.

robolyst.org/ftc-scoring-calculator

This link is live now and never changes. A bookmark saved today is never a dead link.

See last season’s
Reveal day, in person

196 kickoff events are published

FIRST and its regional partners run watch parties with the field, the manual and a room of other teams. Straight from FIRST's event list, so it is the same set your coach sees.

196/196
Kickoff weekend

Your first 72 hours

Saturday

Understand the game

  • Read Manual Part 2 end to end before anyone touches a robot.
  • Write the kickoff entry in Documentation. A dated day-one entry is the easiest judging point you will ever bank.
  • Dump every idea into Tasks unfiltered. Sort tomorrow.
Sunday

Pick a strategy

  • Score the game on paper. Find the highest points-per-minute you can actually pull off.
  • Set up subteams and leads: build, programming, outreach, docs.
  • Log the reasoning. Reasoning wins Think and Design awards; outcomes do not.
Monday

Lock the season down

  • Pick your events from the ones already scheduled. The build calendar back-fills from that date.
  • Set a budget before you spend anything. Seven categories, ten minutes.
  • Send the first sponsor emails. September asks get answered; March asks do not.
Step one

Claim your team

Your team is already in the directory. All 24,368 are. Claiming creates your workspace and makes your group the owner of that number's public profile, website and sponsors.

Only a team owner can finish step 3. Verification needs the FIRST coach dashboard, your team's own website, or its DNS. Catch your coach at kickoff; they are already logged in for registration.

Verified unlocks ProfileWebsiteSponsorsInboxFiscal account
  1. 01

    Find your team

    Search your number. Full event and award history is already attached, straight from FIRST.

  2. 02

    Create your group

    Google, GitHub or email. You are in the toolkit immediately, and everything but the public surfaces works right away.

  3. 03

    Verify

    Three ways: a one-time URL in the Team Website field of your FIRST coach dashboard, a meta tag on the site FIRST already lists for you, or a DNS TXT record. We check within a minute.

  4. 04

    Get your team in

    Invite by email, share one join code, or add placeholders now so your public roster looks finished before anyone signs in.

The toolkit

One workspace instead of nine tabs

Most teams run a season on a group chat, three spreadsheets and one senior's memory. All of that graduates in June. This does not. Free for every team.

Tasks, schedule, checklists

A board with your own statuses, tags and dependencies. A calendar pulling your real FIRST events. Competition checklists that run themselves: packing two days before an event, pre-match fifteen minutes before.

At kickoff: pick your first qualifier and the whole build calendar back-fills.

Documentation

Entries with images, tags, subsystems and contributors, searchable across every season. Templates for meetings, design iterations and tests. A heatmap showing which award categories you have nothing for yet.

At kickoff: a dated day-one entry is impossible to recreate in February.

Members & roles

Owner, Manager and Member ship ready, and 20+ permissions mix into custom roles. A build lead who approves orders but cannot touch the website is one checkbox. Subteams, leads, and placeholders for alumni.

At kickoff: September is recruiting season. Add everyone on day one.

Finance

Season budgets across categories with spend tracked live. Parts requests running from a student’s ask through approval to delivery. Reports by category, vendor, subsystem and member.

At kickoff: set the budget before the first order, not after the fifth.

Public site

A block editor with hero, stats, gallery, awards, sponsors and forms. Live blocks update from your actual season. Bring your own domain and we handle the certificate. Analytics show which sponsor logos got clicked.

At kickoff: sponsors look you up before they reply.

Shared inbox

A real team address the whole team shares. Threads, labels, replies. Sponsor conversations live where your successor can find them, not in a graduating senior’s Gmail.

At kickoff: set it up before the first sponsor ask goes out.

Everything in the toolkit, in depth
Fiscal sponsorship · optional

Be a 501(c)(3) by the first sponsor email

Most teams lose sponsors to one sentence: we can only give to a registered nonprofit. A fiscal account puts your team under The Robotics Catalyst Foundation's 501(c)(3), so a company can write you a tax-deductible cheque without involving your district.

4% Of what flows through
$0 To apply
39-2225353 Foundation EIN
501(c)(3) Tax-deductible
Team card

•••• •••• •••• 0013

Sample team 08/29

Cards with limits

Issue to a mentor or student lead with a monthly cap, freezable in one click. Spending is locked to sensible merchant categories, and anything else declines in real time.

Receipts from purchase one

Upload the receipt, pick where the cheque goes, get paid. No shoebox, no chasing, nobody quietly absorbing $400 of parts.

Donors tracked

Every donor and their total giving in one list, receipts sent automatically. That list is what next September’s renewal emails come from.

  1. 01

    Claim and verify first — a fiscal account belongs to a verified team number.

  2. 02

    Apply — team details, who is responsible, a mailing address. Ten minutes, and you can leave and come back.

  3. 03

    We review — a person reads every application, and tells you exactly what is missing if anything is.

  4. 04

    Account goes live — balance, donation page and cards together. Your first sponsor cheque has somewhere to land.

US teams only, for now. Cards and cheque reimbursements run through a US banking partner. Everything else on Robolyst works anywhere, so tell us where you are and we will factor it in.

Apply for a fiscal account How it works

Donations are made to The Robotics Catalyst Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 39-2225353) acting as your team's fiscal sponsor. The Foundation retains full control and discretion over the funds and directs them to support the team. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

The hub

Bookmark this instead of forty tabs

Official documents, the places teams actually talk, and our own pages. Kept current all season, not just kickoff weekend.

Official — FIRST

Where teams talk

On Robolyst — data

On Robolyst — build with it

Metrics, explained

Keep up without checking

Community links are curated by us and submitted by teams. We link out freely. None of these are competitors, and a team that trusts this page comes back to it every week.

The season ahead

336 events are already on the calendar

Find your qualifier

Every published 2026–2027 event, mapped and searchable. Pick yours on Monday and your build calendar gets a deadline.

Browse events near me

Rookie team?

A build season plan, a budget template and your claimed team. Ignore scouting until January. We will send one email a week in the order you actually need it.

Start here

Already on Robolyst?

Roll over in one click. Roster, subteams, sponsors, checklists and last year’s budget carry forward; last season’s tasks and docs archive without being deleted.

Start 2026–2027

Borrow last season’s code

Teams publish code, CAD and scouting tools to the open source directory. Browse before writing a gamepad wrapper from scratch for the fourth year, then publish yours.

Open source

Scouting metrics, explained

OPR, OPRc and the rest: what they measure, where they mislead, and how to use them. Built on 191,068 matches.

Read it

Send this to your team

One link with the stream, the manual, the calculator and the guides. Put it in your team chat now so nobody spends Saturday morning hunting for a URL.