2025-2026: DECODE

MONTANA CHAMPIONSHIP UPDATE:

RoboScout Squad won the robot game at the Montana FTC Championship and also received the 2nd Place Inspire Award. We will be attending the FTC World Championship in Houston in late April. Learn how you can help us get there on our World Championship page.

Join us as we investigate the power of artifacts and unlock mysteries!!! This season, we are exploring archaeology in the 2025-2026 FTC game #DECODE presented by RTX. Sorry, the season blog is behind. We’ll update with highlights soon.

2/6/2026 – Montana FTC Championship weekend at MSU

It was an exciting day, and we came out on top.

After going 6:1 in the qualifying rounds, we were queued up as the #5 Alliance. Team 4133 Fusion from Helena, the #2 seed, selected us as their alliance partner. We went undefeated through the playoffs and won the final match. We also received the 2nd place Inspire Award. The 2 teams representing Montana at the FTC World Championship are RoboScout Squad and Fusion.

Chief Engineer Lillie is also a Dean’s List finalist for Montana. She will go up against the other North American finalists at Worlds, where only 10 FTC students will win this prestigious leadership award.

If you’d like to learn how you can help us get to the World Championship, click here.

2/2/2026 – Wildtorium Exhibit Delivery

Infinity Trax marble run delivered!

For the last few months, we’ve been working on creating a marble run exhibit for the new Wildtorium Children’s Museum, opening soon in Kalispell. It took 125 hours of 3D printing and 70+ man-hours of assembly. We even brought alumni back to help. Special thanks to Lowe’s in Kalispell for supplying the hardware and Sadino Construction for building the box.

4 children can play independently or collaboratively, developing early engineering, spatial reasoning, problem solving, creativity, and find motor skills. We look forward to finishing up the exhibit in its new space and helping Wildtorium with its opening celebrations.

1/24/2026 – Kalispell FLL Qualifier

The 2026 Kalispell FLL Qualifier was a great success.

We love supporting FIRST LEGO League in our community! The kids competing in FLL will age out and seek FTC teams to continue their STEM journey.

3 of the West Valley teams qualified for state, including Coco’s team “The ADAMAS”, as well as 2 from Somers/Lakeside and 1 from Eureka.

Lacey and Riley were at the FTC table all day sharing the robot with the FLL students, Lillie was a ref, and Aubrey was a match queuer. At the end of the event, waiting for judging results, Coco and Lillie entertained the kids with our bot, along with EHackers’.

1/12/2026 – Late-Season Modifications

We’ve come so far and we’re almost done!

The final things we’re working on these last few weeks of the season are driver practice, improving our autonomous, decreasing our shooting cycle time, completing our lighting feedback systems, and adding a kickstand to reduce the contact area of the robot in the end game base. Congrats to Coco for learning how to and then implementing our dual state-machine autonomous programs.

12/15/2025 – Holiday Elves

We celebrated the holidays together.

We brought together our team, parents, coaches and alums to work on our Infinity Trax project. How do you celebrate Instagram milestones? With cake, of course! Thank you to our 2500 followers. We love connecting, sharing and having fun with the FTC community.

11/22/2025 – Butte Qualifier at Montana Tech

Qual 1 is in the bag! 34 teams!!!! The biggest FTC tournament Montana has ever had!

We went 4:1 in qualifying matches behind the unstoppable E-Hackers and Couch Potatoes from Eureka. Captain of the #3 Alliance, we chose Fusion 4133 from Helena to be our alliance partner. We ended the robot game in 3rd place and came home with the Inspire Award. For our rookies, Lacey and Aubrey, this was their first full FTC tournament experience. Our success at this tournament secured the 1st place advancement slot to the Montana FTC Championship in February.

11/7/2025 – 3rd Annual NW Montana FTC Scrimmage

The scrimmage was a great success! 8 teams from Kalispell, Eureka, Libby, and Alberton attended to test their early robot builds. RoboScout Squad, Thunder Lab (thanks for helping with setup), E-Hackers, Couch Potatoes, Laser Sharks in Space, Herd of Nerds, Alberton Panther Robotic,s and Analysis Paralysis. Special thanks to West Valley Middle School for allowing us to use the gym to inspire others.

9/7 -11/6/2025 – Early Build

So many early decisions, low-fidelity prototypes, a wooden bot…. that’s what happens after kickoff.

We were very fortunate to secure a third-hand, CNC machine over the summer. Thank you to Bison Laser and West Valley Tech Warriors for cutting the early parts while we were learning to get the CNC running, which we did, in time to make our SRPP side panels. Self-reinforced polypropylene is commonly used in hard-sided luggage and battlebots, brand name Tegris. It is much lighter than aluminum and polycarbonate. It’s also more impact-resistant than polycarb, excellent for this season’s more full-contact game.

9/6/2025 – FTC DECODE Season Kickoff at Lincoln County High School

This year, we teamed up with our friends the E-Hackers and co-hosted kickoff at their high school.

Teams in attendance: RoboScout Squad, E-Hackers, Lazer Sharks in Space, Couch Potatoes, Herd of Nerds, and Thunder Lab.

We were excited to see an image of Coco and Lillie from the Worlds 2025 Silent Disco night shared in the official FTC broadcast.

9/1/2025 – All in for Kickoff

As we did last season, our team had an “All in for Kickoff” initiative to spread excitement for kickoff around the world.

12 teams took up our offer this season, including 1 from Canada and 1 from Moldova. We sent custom bracelets, and they sent back social media posts and images of teamwork and celebration for their kickoff events.

8/7/2025 – Team REV Applications are now OPEN

We love #TeamREV

Each season REV Robotics selects over 70 FIRST teams from around the world and awards $100,000 in sponsorships. We are fortunate to have been selected for Team REV for the last 2 seasons and loved it all. The Team REV community is open, supportive, encouraging and fun!

Apply Now

8/3/2025 – Save the date! Kickoff!

NW Montana 2025-2026 DECODE Season Kickoff

Date: Saturday 9/6/2025

Time: 9:00am – 1:00pm, breakfast and lunch provided

Where: Lincoln County High School, Eureka, Montana

Hosted By: Team Eureka Robotics (E-Hackers, Lazer Sharks in Space, Couch Potatoes) and RoboScout Squad 18240

Please RSVP to ehackers8271@gmail.com

8/2/2025 – Competition Manual v0 Released

Here is the link to the DECODE Competition Manual. Version 0 has been released.

Same as last season, the single Competition Manual was released this week. This contains general robot build rules, “evergreen rules” (rules that don’t generally change from year to year), advancement and awards. Game specific rules and field parameters will be added to the document at kickoff, there are placeholders present.

Important rule changes that stuck out in v0:

R105: Expansion limit.

Last season a horizontal expansion limit was introduced. This season, the rule has been updated to “Expansion Limit” and shows 2 place holder boxes for diagrams. We’ll know more at Kickoff.

R401, R402, R403 – Robot Sign Rules

The license plates have changed. Team number now has to be 2.25″ tall. That’s a bummer for those of us that made reusable plates. There must be at least a 1/4″ alliance specific background (border) around the numbers. Which means at minimum your height is 2.75″. Length is still at least 6.5″

R502 & R503 – Servo restrictions

We are now limited to 10 total servos. Unless that’s a typo, we are losing 2 servos.

Also remember if your servo isn’t listed on the chart, be sure to have documentation.

R505 – Lots of Servo Power Modules approved this season

R609 – New Power Switch options

6.3 – Awards — New Awards

Portfolio required for Inspire, Think and Control Awards

Motivate Award is gone

Control Award is slightly revised

New Awards: Reach (outreach) and Sustain (business / team sustainability)

Note: The rules and screenshots shown above are subject to change and may not be updated here, please always check the manual for the most recent information.

7/31/2025 – Advancement Changes

FTC Advancement will now be decided by a points system. Please see the FTC Blog post for the details.

We did a review of our previous seasons to see if this point system were in place, would we still have advanced. Yes, all 3 times. That being said, the Montana 2019 season, the Winning Alliance Captain would not have advanced because they didn’t receive a 1st place award. Winning Alliance Captain or 1st Inspire is no longer a mathematical certainty for advancement. You need one or the other and a 1st place award in most cases. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

6/25/2025 – CNC fabrication coming soon!

We have acquired a used Inventables X-Carve with a 500x500mm cutting area. We are so excited to learn and be able to do our own prototyping and cuts in wood and plastics. Also shown here with Coco and Lillie are 3 of our new rookies, Essence, Lacey and Aubrey.

5/23/2025 – Pre-Orders for Game Sets

Pre-orders from AndyMark are now open. Game sets usually ship the week after kickoff. Here are the links to purchase the new products and our thoughts:

The difference in price between the partial and full set is almost half, we think it’s likely that the partial will half a field, including 1 alliance specific color of elements and either a full or half set of neutral elements. If that’s the case, it is also likely the field structure(s) consist of smaller structures for each alliance. Additionally it costs exactly twice as much in shipping charges for the full set compared to the partial set.

There are definitely more tools in this year’s tool kit which leads us to believe it will be at least a little more complex than the last 2-3 seasons.

What are your thoughts on the season? Any guesses about the game itself?

Partial Game Set – $250 – choice of red or blue, looks like it will be exactly half of a field worth of structure and game elements – “comes with all game specific items needed to practice DECODE”

Full Game Set – $485 – everything you need for a full competition match, all structures and game elements

Field Assembly Tool Kit – $52 – all the tools needed to assemble this year’s field – note, you can get these tools cheaper at the hardware store / Amazon.

Tapes – $46 – 165 ft each of red, blue and white 1″ gaffing tapes for marking the field – note, you can get rolls on Amazon for about $10 each

5/6/2025 – We are getting ready for next season! Interested in joining us? Please plan to come to our open houses later this month or fill out our interest form and we’ll get back to you. https://forms.gle/eatfPouZW8BnMyjB7