After you have received your FTC competition kit, you may be wondering what to do next. It’s time to brush up your robot-programming and -building skills so you’re competition ready. Luckily, there are many training resources available to help you with the FTC building system.

Here are a few we find helpful:

In partnership with FIRST, National Instruments, Carnegie Mellon, and Enable Training and Consulting a FTC Training resource is available at TETRIXrobotics.com/FTC. This page contains all of the getting started information, as well as, a variety of additional hardware and programming challenges, that are specific to FTC. Teams are also able to sign-up for or view a variety of webinars that correlate to some of the activities hosted on the page.

The TETRIX Getting Started Guide that comes free in every base kit is a great place to start. This guide contains geting started activities to help team members become comfortable building and programming a working robot. An online version of this guide is also available here.

At ni.com/first you can find useful LabVIEW™ training videos, tutorials, and discussion forums.

TETRIXmastery.com offers cool videos and comprehensive programming tutorials.

Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Academy delivers some excellent ROBOTC^® and LabVIEW™ materials.

At PTC's FIRST page, you can learn how to access industry leading software which PTC donates to all FIRST teams. This software will aid in both your Robot Design and Team Collaboration. Also avaliable at this site is the entire FTC kit of parts modeled in Pro/ENGINEER.

Don't for get to get the most out of your TETRIX resources. Combining LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT with TETRIX can help convert any high school classroom into a hands-on robotics laboratory. Visit the MINDSTORMS Controlled/In the Classroom section of TETRIXrobotics.com and see how easy it is to bring TETRIX into the classroom.