Students K-8th

There are robotics programs running all the way from elementary school, and Hopkins elementary and middle schools have teams for each of these. Here's an explanation for both lower-level programs and how they fit in to the different grade levels in our district.

FIRST LEGO League (FLL)

The earliest FIRST opportunity is FIRST LEGO League, or FLL, which can be joined in elementary school (K-5th), and there are 3 different levels geared toward different grade compositions. Our teams generally run from September or August to January or February, but times vary within this range between teams and levels.

In FLL, kids build watermelon-sized robots out of LEGOs and run them with LEGO’s built-in block-based programming language, with the goal of completing a challenge in competition with other teams' robots. FLL is a great way to let kids start developing their skills early on, which will be valuable even if they decide not to participate in future FIRST programs.

FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC)

FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) is the second FIRST program, and is available for students in middle school (6th-8th). Our teams run from the middle of August to the middle of February.

FTC is a more open-ended competition than FLL. Students are only given a base kit, from which they build and program a robot to complete a series of challenges. The team then goes to competition against other local teams to see which robot is most effective. FTC serves as a great introduction to robotics for students before they are old enough to join a high school team. Even if a student decides not to continue robotics, they will learn engineering and teamwork principles which translate to real life skills and opportunities.

FLL