We currently compete in VEX and FRC, but are looking to maybe drop VEX. We like having something to compete in from August to December, and VEX is cheap, but I think kids are getting burned out with it. We have considered FTC, but had some questions.
GM0 has a great amount of information about FTC and specifically this resources list for new teams
I have no reference for moving from vex to FTC and I’m from Michigan where FTC is limited to middle school.
The events are multiple days, I don’t know current costs (we don’t have a team this year for FTC) but FTC can be good for high schools especially ones familar with Vex form factor and size vs the larger FRC form factor. The cost is significantly cheaper than 6 FRC teams. You will be limited to 15 students per team max in FTC. FRC has no max so if you merged all of the teams to one FRC team you might save money.
We only have 1 FRCFIRST Robotics Competition team. We have 6 VEX teams currently.
A number of these answers will depend on where your team is located.
Nevermind I misunderstood the purpose. You are looking for an out of FRC season alternative to Vex, then yes FTC is a good fit.
I didn’t think about the fact that most of your VEX team is probably already in your FRC team anyways.
My take, having previously taught at schools doing exclusively VEX, exclusively FRC, and currently teach at a school exclusively doing FTC:
We are also in East TN, and I work with FTC and FRC. The registration cost is $295 currently, but FTC-specific robot control system and parts would probably run about $1000. More so than in FRC, components can be reused in FTC. There are a number of grant available for FTC in our state.
The biggest issue I think you’ll encounter using FTC as a fall semester activity is that is really isn’t that at all in TN. Our state tournament is always in February. The FTC team here at my school often travels out of state, but aside from scrimmages, there’s almost never a qualifier or tournament before early January.
FTC is just fine for high school kids. My school runs FTC out of the middle school, with FRC as high school program. There’s also some overlap. In TN, my experience has been that more than half of the teams are high school FTC programs that are not affiliated with an FRC program.
So it seems like we may be stuck with doing VEX then. I like having the fall offseason stuff for them to do as I feel it has helped grow the team, but VEX is just boring compared to FRCFIRST Robotics Competition ha.
Couple tips perhaps from an ftc alum:
Events being multiple days is entirely dependent on the region and event. Over here in PA qualifiers are usually one day, and the state championship is also one day. Sometimes its two, but mostly I’ve seen one day events.
The registration costs have been mentioned before, but the control system is about $1000 (and I’d suggest getting spares of some parts, so that can easily go up to $1500). You can usually run bigger FTC teams then Vex teams (I don’t know how you structured it, my old vex team never went above 6-7 students per team). Robot expenses will vary per season, I think the minimum viable kit to get started if you want to be somewhat competitive will run you about $600 for the base parts plus maybe $200-500 a season in extra parts. This can easily get into the thousands range when you start talking about custom manufacturing and the like.
The flexibility does help prevent burnout a lot, I feel, since there is always so much to explore and do.
I do agree Vex can be somewhat limiting and the burnout is understandable. Maybe some sort of in between solution like running your own design challenges could be a possibility?
Have you considered maybe focusing on FRCFIRST Robotics Competition year round? It could let you reduce your schedule a bit to help with burnout and also allow you to develop new techniques in the offseason. I don’t know if there are any offseason competitions near you, but that could also be a way to still compete and would provide an opportunity to run R&D robots in an actual game.
Yes, we have tried that somewhat in the past; however, we didn’t seem to have very good turnout and by the time January came around we were left with about 10 kids that hadn’t migrated to other clubs throughout the semester.
We switched from Vex to FTC this year. We were using Vex primarily to introduce our underclassmen to robotics concepts with minimal effort during the off-season.
I prefer FTC and pushed for it for the following reasons:
Our Vex scene in CT involves a lot of defensive play. FTC clearly discourages defense, which means teams can focus on the challenge of the game.
Vex’s parts limitations are incredibly strict. While this potentially keeps play fair, it severely limits creativity and learning opportunities. Meanwhile, FTC’s biggest limitation is a ban on COTS grippers.
This means 3D printing, routing, and CAD are heavily encouraged, which are skills much more transferable to FRC.
Our costs this year are a little over $10K for 2 teams worth of registration and 3 teams worth of supplies. This is mostly because I push for a COTS based system with our teams only making custom parts for specific mechanisms.
The one thing that sucks is that all of CTs events take place in FRC’s build season, while our local Vex stuff does not. We’ll see how that effects us next year.
I know I didn’t answer questions directly, but this is just some thoughts and context on why we made the switch.
It might still be worth putting the effort you’re currently putting into Vex into a more rigorous and engaging FRC off-season. As far as burnout, I don’t think you’re likely to find FTC less demanding than VEX.
For the off-season, some teams build a whole new FRC robot from scratch in the fall, or a full-scale robot with similar parts for another purpose (such as a T-shirt cannon). Some teams design thoughtful, rigorous training programs that get new members up to speed that include things like programming a new auton routine for last year’s robot completely from scratch, or machining a set of complex CNC parts that have to fit together. I had great success in the past with running an FTC-like competition purely within our own team; we split into 5 groups of 5-7 students, each team built their own little robot to play an old FTC game, and we held a mini-tournament in the gym at the end of the semester. It was very challenging for our teams to finish their robots by the end of the semester - not a chance in heck they would have had anything remotely presentable at the beginning of November (when the first FTC qualifier typically is) - but they were very engaged and extremely prepared for build season.
In contrast, I have found that improving last year’s robot for an off-season competition was fun for returning members but very hard for rookies to get interested in, and telling team captains to figure out their own training plan for new subteam members was not very successful either. If less than half of new recruits are sticking around through the fall semester, the most likely culprit is that when they come to meetings, no one says hi when they walk in the door, no one tells them what the team is working on, no one gives them a task, maybe occasionally someone gives them a task they don’t understand and are afraid to ask questions, and/or they spend a lot of time standing around feeling awkward, and eventually they say “screw this”. Or the training feel more like a boring class they have to sit through, and they don’t see the connection to what they actually want to do (build robots). Off-seasons need an engaging, challenging, relevant project and constant, deliberate effort to get new members’ hands on robots.
The burnout is not from the rigor of VEX, rather the kids find it somewhat boring, especially after they get a taste of FRC.
I want to be able to do additional FRC builds during an offseason; however, we are limited in budget and I don’t feel we have “extra” structural material lying around for students to use to build mechanisms, etc. I have had a couple of students building an AndyMark chassis this offseason that we can use to learn wiring and programming, but not sure we can build intakes, etc. with what we have laying around.
We have thought about the training sessions, but we are worried that without the build component of at least VEX then, kids will, as you noted, feel like it is a boring class.
If you have 6 Vex teams, could you make 6 FTC teams then have them just compete against each other rather then external? You could also do skills challenges against the current WR and such.
Not a full solution, but something maybe.
Yeah we could do that. I don’t know what the optimal solution is. I just wish either VEX was more exciting or FIRST was cheaper haha.
I think this is a good solution too. We did basically this for a couple years; it was a lot of work on the mentor side but probably not more work than running VEX teams for that time. Plus with an internal competition you can focus more on things that are good training for FRC but not necessarily a good ROI for being a competitive FTC team (like custom machining). And you save on registration fees and travel expenses (if you would have paid for buses, team lunch, etc at competitions).
Arguably this is a great ROI for an FTCFIRST Tech Challenge team, coming from one with custom machining 
And you save on registration fees and travel expenses (if you would have paid for buses, team lunch, etc at competitions).
This is the big one for me. Its more cost effective, it means less students have to travel (and mess up schoolwork in the process), and you can tweak things to help teach FRCFIRST Robotics Competition design principles more (encourage boxtube elevators?)
Have you thought about FRC off-season events as an alternative? You could build a new robot for events if desired or just build skills working on previous season’s robot. There’s the RoboRodeo in Knoxville in September. There’s also off-season options in VA, GA, NC, and SC. Might be a good option if you are looking to build FRC skills. FTC is great, but I don’t see it as an optimal training program for FRC.