about / the colophon
One student, every department.
LearnFRC is a free FRC curriculum built and maintained by Jahaan Pardhanani, a high-school student. This page is the honest version: who writes it, what it is drafted from, how it gets checked, and how to tell me when it is wrong.
who is responsible
Jahaan Pardhanani
Writes, edits, builds and runs the site. No company, no editorial staff, no review board.
- drafted
- AI-assisted, against sources
- reviewed
- by hand, before publishing
- corrected
- in public, with the date
if it’s wrong, it’s mine to fix
the catalogue today
- 11
- departmentsone per job on a team
- 101
- modulesa department, broken up
- 394
- lessonswritten and reviewed
- 103
- articleslonger, season-specific
Counted from the catalogue when this page was built, not typed in by hand. Everything is free to read without an account: no ads, nothing to buy, no paid tier.
how a lesson gets written
You should be able to check my work.
Before you rely on a page in your pit, you should be able to judge whether to trust it. Here is the whole process, in order.
Start from primary sources
Every lesson is scoped against the documents that actually govern FRC: the WPILib docs, the FIRST game manual and team updates, and vendor documentation from the companies whose parts you're using. Each department page lists the sources its lessons draw from, and lessons link out to the originals so you can check the claim yourself.
Draft with AI assistance
The first draft of a lesson is AI-assisted, written against those sources rather than from memory. This is disclosed on every page of the site, not buried here. You should always know how what you're reading was made.
Review for accuracy before publishing
Drafts are reviewed against the sources before they go live. Rules, part numbers, deadlines, and API names are the things most likely to be wrong or out of date, so those get checked hardest, and anything that couldn't be verified gets cut rather than hedged.
Fix it in the open when it's wrong
Readers can suggest an edit on any lesson or article. Every open suggestion is public on the contributions page: you can see what's been reported, what's been merged, and who reported it.
Every correction anyone has sent is visible, including the ones still open.
See the correction queueA curriculum, not a forum thread.
LearnFRC is a free, structured curriculum for the FIRST Robotics Competition. It covers 11 departments, from mechanical build and CAD to programming, electrical, controls, strategy, business and outreach, broken into 101 modules and 394 lessons, plus 103 longer articles on the things teams ask about every season: budgets, grants, offseason events, swerve, scouting.
It exists because most of what a rookie needs to know is real but scattered: a Chief Delphi thread from 2019, a paragraph in the WPILib docs, a vendor PDF, someone’s team handbook that never left their Drive. LearnFRC puts it in one place, in an order that makes sense if you’re starting from zero.
Everything is free to read without an account. An account only exists so the site can remember what you’ve finished, group you with your team, and let you suggest edits under your name.
One person, and his name is on it.
I’m Jahaan Pardhanani, a high-school student in the FRC community, and I build, write, edit, and run the site.
That’s worth saying plainly, because it tells you how to read this site. There is no company behind LearnFRC, no editorial staff, and no institutional review board. What there is instead: primary sources on every claim, a disclosed drafting process, a public correction queue, and one person whose name is on all of it. If something here is wrong, it’s mine to fix, and you can tell me directly, without an account.
It doesn’t have to stay one person. If you’ve been on an FRC team and can spare a few hours a month, you can apply to help run the site: answering the feedback readers send in, reviewing suggested edits, checking lessons against their sources.
LearnFRC is in beta and the code is public on GitHub.
Four things LearnFRC won’t pretend to be.
- Not the rulebook.
- LearnFRC explains the game, but the official FIRST game manual is the only authority on rules. Where they disagree, the manual wins and we’re wrong.
- Not affiliated with FIRST.
- LearnFRC is an independent educational project and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by FIRST®. FIRST® and FRC® are trademarks of FIRST.
- Not a substitute for building.
- Reading about swerve is not the same as assembling one. The lessons are written to get you to the shop faster, not to replace it.
- Not finished.
- The site is in beta. Content is added and revised continuously, and a lesson written for one season may need updating for the next.
Corrections are the most useful thing you can send.
There are two ways to send one.
Suggest an edit on the page itself. Open any lesson or article and use the “Suggest an edit” control. You’ll need a free account so the change is attributable to someone. Your suggestion lands in a public queue on the contributions page, where anyone can see what’s open, what was merged, and who sent it.
Or just describe it. If it’s faster to say what’s wrong than to write the fix, use the contact form with the page URL. No account, and no email address unless you want a reply.
Rule references, part numbers, prices, and deadlines go stale every season. Those are exactly the reports worth sending.
New pages, however you read things.
New articles are published to an RSS feed you can add to any reader, and there’s an email list in the footer of every page if you’d rather get new lessons that way. Both are free, and the email list is one-click unsubscribe.
Questions, corrections, or something you wish LearnFRC covered?
Message meLearnFRC is an independent educational project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by FIRST®. FIRST® and FRC® are trademarks of FIRST.