New to FIRST Robotics? Start your journey here.
Getting Started with FRC is the foundational branch of LearnFRC, built for students and rookie teams who are brand-new to the FIRST Robotics Competition. It explains what FIRST is, how the annual season works, how a 2:30 match actually plays out on a 3-vs-3 field, and the culture (Gracious Professionalism and Coopertition) that makes FRC different from any other sport. By the end you will understand the language, the calendar, and the concrete first steps to join or launch a team.
nobody reads these in order, that is fine
modules
7
lessons
28
reading time
17hours
mastered
0per cent
reading is free, no account needed
the path
Start here. Understand the organization behind the competition, the larger family of FIRST programs you may have done (or can mentor), and what specifically makes the FIRST Robotics Competition the 'varsity sport for the mind.'
Learn the annual rhythm of an FRC season and exactly how a match is won. This module turns the jargon — Kickoff, build season, ranking points, alliance selection, endgame — into a clear mental model.
FRC is a team sport with a strong ethos. This module covers the FIRST core values that are judged and rewarded, the real sub-teams and roles that make a team run, and the control-system hardware and software those teams use.
Turn knowledge into action. This module gives a brand-new student a path to join a team, and a brand-new team a concrete roadmap to register, get the Kit of Parts, and build their first robot using free tools and the official Zero-to-Robot guide.
Stop reading and start building. This module walks you through five concrete, end-to-end mini-projects that a rookie can finish in a weekend: spinning your first motor with the REV Hardware Client, deploying a real arcade-drive program to a roboRIO, refactoring into a clean command-based subsystem, building a Fuel launcher for the 2026 REBUILT game, and adding a one-button autonomous routine. Every step uses real parts (AM14U6 chassis, SPARK MAX, NEO) and real, copy-pasteable WPILib 2026 Java code. By the end you will have a robot that drives, shoots, and runs an auto routine.
Every veteran team has a mental checklist of the failures that bite rookies every single year: the robot that won't connect, the 'No Robot Code' message, the dreaded brownout, dead CAN devices, wheels spinning the wrong way, and bumpers that fail inspection. This module turns those hard-won lessons into a systematic debugging workflow. Each lesson gives you the symptom, the real root causes, the exact diagnostic steps (RioLog, Driver Station tabs, Glass, REV/Phoenix tools), and the fix — grounded in the official WPILib troubleshooting docs and the 2026 game manual rules.
Once your robot drives and scores, the next leap is precision and intelligence: closed-loop control that hits a target every time, swerve drive that moves in any direction, AprilTag vision that tells the robot where it is on the field, and data-driven strategy that wins alliance selection. This module is a deep dive into the techniques that separate competitive teams from the pack, each anchored in a concrete REBUILT case study with real parts (Kraken X60, CANcoder, Pigeon 2.0), real tools (SysId, PhotonVision, Statbotics), and real code. It is ambitious but reachable — this is your roadmap from 'it works' to 'it wins'.
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Log in to contribute a lesson7 modules and 28 lessons, free to read without an account, written against the real Game Manual and the WPILib docs. Sign in when you want the ticks to stick and the certificate at the end.