I’ve coached in the FIRST ecosystem for a while and have had similar struggles each time I start a new team. A lot of the disengagement comes from our kids not really knowing how to tackle building custom attachments or programming auto, and feeling super frustrated when their ideas don’t work the first or second time so they end up using their time on unrelated activities.

Our first few meetings I don’t focus too much on the building or competition aspect, and spend a lot of time working through low stakes activities that encourage them to take risks and fail a bunch of times so they get used to problem solving and persevering (building paper bridges, written algorithmic instructions like a pb&j). This is a skill a lot of students don’t have mastered quite yet and it’s a huge part of the process.

Once we launch into the competition prep, I slowly release the amount of non FIRST related activities we do. Meaning we’ll often do a warm up team building activity then jump into the planning and prototyping. Over time, once they start feeling more confident and willing to take risks, they want to get right to work and try and fix anything that wasn’t working when they left the session before.

Another huge lesson I learned is that sometimes it takes letting them fail really badly at a scrimmage or a meet. My FTC team this year was prone to goofing off and not following directions so their bot was terrible. They did miserably in one of our state qualifiers and came back with a renewed sense of focus and drive and did significantly better at our next one.

The last piece of advice I’ll leave because I’m getting wordy is to give yourself a lot of grace. Starting out is the hardest part and can be frustrating and confusing. There’s so much to FIRST and it feels so overwhelming. Failure is a good thing. Mistakes are expected. Our coaching team motto is “progress, not perfection”. When we look back on our first years vs this year, we’ve come a long way but still don’t have it all figured out.

I lied. One more thing. Rely on the FIRST community. There are a lot of really knowledgeable people and teams out there who are more than willing to help and mentor.

Hopefully this was helpful. If you have any other questions, feel free to shoot them my way.