Ask the average person on the street what skills are needed to build a robot, and they would probably describe some combination of electrical engineering, computer science and mechanical design.
When members of FRC Team 9101, aka Green Mountain Robotics, were asked the same question, the Chittenden County high school students provided a more expansive answer that also included the kind of know-how taught in college-level business courses: public speaking, marketing, grant writing and project management.
“We basically operate like a small company,” said Dominic Petrarca, an 18-year-old Essex High School senior.
The team’s entrant, named Champ, is a 3-foot-tall metallic structure that resembles a guillotine on wheels, minus the decapitating blade.
On a recent Friday night, Petrarca was one of 10 team members at Generator Makerspace in Burlington who were testing and fine-tuning their newly completed robot for the international FIRST Robotics Competition, or FRC.
The Burlington-area team’s entrant, named Champ, is a 3-foot-tall metallic structure that resembles a guillotine on wheels, minus the decapitating blade. Its central component is a three-stage “elevator” that can extend nearly nine feet in the air. Champ is also equipped with cameras that can read simple barcodes, called AprilTags, that enable it to navigate on its own. And it has an arm that extends outward to lift and manipulate objects.
The students conceived, designed, programmed and built their robot from scratch in just six weeks, ahead of a district event last weekend in Lewiston, Maine, where they won the prestigious Engineering Inspiration Award.
In the world of competitive high school robotics, FRC robots are the largest, fastest and most exciting to watch. They’re also the most sophisticated — and expensive. Green Mountain Robotics’ 150-pound bot, which can move at 15 miles per hour and perform multiple tasks autonomously and by remote control, cost about $10,000 to build, all of which the students raised themselves through grants and corporate sponsorships.
Their goal is to be one of 600 teams worldwide invited to the FIRST Championship in Houston in April. To get there, they must first do well at a New England tournament later this month at the University of Vermont. It’s the first time the state has ever hosted a regional robotics tournament at the highest level — akin to holding a March Madness basketball game in UVM’s Patrick Gymnasium.
That 32 of New England’s best FRC robots will compete in Vermont is a testament to how far the state’s student robotics community has advanced. Three years ago, Vermont had one of the country’s lowest per capita rates of participation. Today, it’s at or above the national average, with more than 100 robotics teams ranging from kindergartners to high school seniors. That includes nine elite FRC teams, such as Green Mountain Robotics, with new ones being added each year.
Such rapid growth is due, in part, to a $375,000 grant from the Argosy Foundation, which helped launch the nonprofit group FIRST in Vermont in 2021. Local educators, mentors and business leaders have also invested considerable time, energy and resources into these robotics clubs because they recognize the role they play in sparking student interest in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Many team mentors and coaches work at local tech companies, including Beta Technologies, GlobalFoundries, Hazelett Strip-Casting and Agilent, that are populated by former FIRST Robotics participants.
“I’ve seen the power of robotics programs to change students’ lives,” said Linda Schadler, 61, UVM’s acting provost and former dean of the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, who was instrumental in bringing the FIRST Robotics tournament to Patrick Gym.
FIRST, an acronym of “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology,” is a global nonprofit founded in 1989 by engineer and entrepreneur Dean Kamen, best known as the inventor of the Segway. The group promotes STEM education by starting kids young. FIRST LEGO League is open to student in grades pre-K to 8, then progresses to FIRST Tech Challenge for those at grades 7 to 12, followed by FIRST Robotics Competition for grades 9 to 12.
Though FIRST Robotics events are ostensibly competitions, above all else they emphasize the organization’s core values of sportsmanship, inclusion, innovation, teamwork and fun. That’s why FIRST events are also called “coopertitions.” They encourage teams to both compete and collaborate by sharing ideas, equipment, software and problem-solving techniques.
Here’s how FRC events work: Beginning in January, about 3,700 teams from 32 countries all received a short video and a 164-page game manual that spelled out the rules and specs for this year’s season. Each team then had six weeks to design and build a robot that can perform different tasks. Aside from some basic components such as batteries, wheels and motors, none of the parts could be designed or fabricated in advance.
This year’s season has an ocean-oriented theme called “Reefscape.” During each match, two alliances of three teams apiece compete on a 70-by-30-foot indoor playing field. Teams earn points when their robot completes tasks such as “harvesting algae” (lifting large rubber balls and depositing them in a bin) and “seeding coral” (placing PVC pipes onto a large metal structure, or “reef”), then returns to its “barge,” or home, by attaching itself to a hanging metal cage and hoisting itself off the floor. How each robot performs those tasks is determined entirely by the students, and no two robots are alike.
Every robot need not be a jack-of-all-trades. Green Mountain Robotics member Clay Nicholson, a 16-year-old junior from Champlain Valley Union High School, explained that one team’s robot may specialize in a couple of tasks and perform them really well each time, whereas another team’s robot might perform all the tasks but with lower degrees of accuracy. In its rookie year in 2023, Green Mountain Robotics built a robot that could perform only one task but do it exceedingly well. The team went on to compete in the world championship. Nicholson called it “an exercise in game theory.”
“You’re all trying to help each other win.” Max Drapa
FRC robots not only have to be fast, accurate and reliable but also durable enough to sustain impacts from other robots. With six robots roving the floor at up to 20 miles per hour, collisions are inevitable. That said, FRC events are not like the popular TV show “Robot Wars.” Teams are penalized if they deliberately hinder, damage or disable another team’s robot.
“You’re all trying to help each other win,” said Max Drapa, 17, an Essex High School senior and founding member of the team. It’s not just poor sportsmanship to hinder another team’s progress, he said; it’s also bad strategy. A team that’s your opponent in one match may be your ally in the next one.
Last year, Green Mountain Robotics had motors that kept failing during an event, and the students couldn’t figure out why. (The problem turned out to be a manufacturer error.) Mid-competition, another team offered them replacement parts so they could continue in the event.
Such cooperative behavior is rewarded with points that go toward qualifying for the world championship. Of the seven trophies that Drapa and Nicholson showed off from past seasons, the one they’re most proud of is the Gracious Professionalism Award, which the team won at last year’s New England district championship. It’s awarded to the team that best embodies all the values of FIRST.
Teams can also earn points off the playing field, in ways that seem only tangentially related to robotics. To succeed at FRC events, participants must demonstrate more than just tech savvy but also strong interpersonal skills. Teams have to give oral presentations to judges, during which they explain how they chose the robot’s design, what it took to build it, and whom they contacted in their community for funding and technical support.
“It’s communication, it’s collaboration and all this other goop that, I gotta tell you, they don’t teach us engineers!” said John Cohn, 66, an IBM fellow emeritus and FIRST in Vermont board member. Cohn, who now works at Beta Technologies, said that at last count, there were about 40 employees of the South Burlington electric aviation company who participated in FIRST Robotics clubs when they were young.
“It’s a phenomenal extracurricular activity, and I loved every second of it,” said Guy Shaffer, 25, of Williston, who participated in FIRST Robotics as a teen and now works as an equipment engineer at Essex chip manufacturer GlobalFoundries. Shaffer is co-coaching the Green Mountain Robotics team with Joseph Chase, 61, a retired Essex science teacher who now serves as state coordinator of FIRST in Vermont. While both men provide their team with guidance to stay on task, they let the teens do most of the talking.
And these kids are strong communicators. Members of Green Mountain Robotics cold-called Beta and other Vermont tech firms to line up sponsorships, order equipment, and solicit technical help with machining parts and running computer simulations. Team members also gave presentations at GlobalFoundries, at the Vermont Superintendents Association and to Gov. Phil Scott.
Those efforts yielded more than $70,000 that will support other FIRST Robotics teams and summer camps throughout the state, some of which the teens run themselves. Those community-oriented activities further help the team accrue points that could win it a coveted trophy called the Impact Award.
Ultimately, FIRST robotics teams are less about channeling students into STEM-specific careers than they are about teaching kids valuable skills that are applicable in numerous professions: critical thinking, trial and error, team building, and time and money management.
“We’ve had people come along and say, ‘I’m not that interested in robots. I want to go to law school,'” Petrarca said. “How the heck do we get people to understand that robotics club can be about a lot more than just robots?”
Correction, March 24, 2025: An earlier version of this story misstated the age categories for FIRST Robotics competitions.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Aye, Robot | Vermont’s student robotics community comes of age as it hosts the FIRST Robotics New England district tournament”
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This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2025.
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