Building a Robot in 3 Days by Hala K. '29
FIRST X MIT Edition
If you are unfamiliar with the FIRST Robotics program:
FIRST is a global nonprofit organization that runs after-school STEM programs and robotics competitions for K-12 students. It has three major programs: FIRST LEGO League (FLL), FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC), and FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). While there aren’t strict age limits, in my experience (in Michigan), FLL typically targets elementary school students, FTC targets middle school students (though it targets high schoolers in many other regions), and FRC targets high school students.
Each program has an annual “kickoff day,” where a brand-new challenge is revealed and teams are given a limited amount of time to design, build, and program a robot to compete. The build season is filled with long nights spent iterating, failing, and fixing the robot. During the off-season, teams go beyond robots, volunteering for community service, mentoring younger students, starting new teams, and working to bring STEM into their communities.
It’s hard to summarize it all in such a short blurb so read a little more here and here.
Only two weeks into middle school, fifth-grade Hala stormed into the computer lab with a mission she refused to back down from.
“It isn’t fair that fifth graders don’t get to do robotics,” I argued. “What makes the sixth graders so much smarter?”
Yes, I know it’s a little over the top but I had recently heard the news that while my middle school was finally creating an after school robotics team, I was deemed too young to participate.
After a lot of back-and-forth with the coach – and essentially refusing to take no for an answer – he finally agreed to let me join on a “trial” basis.
For the next eight years, robotics became an integral part of my life. I spent at least twenty hours a week in meetings, then came home just to do more work. Dinner conversations revolved around the robot’s progress and my friends learned that hangouts could only happen after 3:00 p.m. on weekends.
Yet robotics never felt like a burden. If anything, I walked into each meeting more excited than the last.
With this, my senior year was very exciting but also very sad – I knew that it was my last season ever. I wouldn’t attend another massive kickoff event, joking with my team about the odds of an underwater challenge. I wouldn’t yell “ENABLE” and watch the robot immediately try to destroy itself during testing. I wouldn’t stress over our Impact Award presentation, rehearsing the intro over and over again in random nooks of whatever school we were competing at. I wouldn’t travel with my team – playing Jackbox too late in the hotel lobby and falling asleep to rom-coms in cramped rooms with friends.
I wouldn’t do robotics again. Not any part of it.
Turns out, I was wrong.
Just a couple weeks into freshman fall, I received an email titled “[FIRSTxMIT] Interest for Robot in 3 Days (Ri3D).” Given MIT’s role in inspiring the founding of FIRST, I had always been surprised that it hadn’t participated in a Robot in 3 Days. So, I filled out the form and went on with my life.
A few months later, I found myself at MIT, standing in a makerspace with a group of “strangers” who were now my teammates, a pile of plywood, and exactly three days to build a robot – something FRC teams are usually given six weeks to do.
Honestly, I went into the Ri3D experience with low expectations. I didn’t know many people on the team. My home team coded in C++, while we would be working in Java. And I couldn’t quite understand how a functional robot could come together in just three days.
But as kickoff played on the big screen and I looked around the room, watching everyone light up at the game reveal, I realized I was exactly where I wanted to be.
So, without further ado, here are some of my reflections on the three days:
What struck me almost immediately was how much this felt like being on a rookie team again.
We didn’t have many of the “nice-to-have” materials. Nearly everything was donated by other teams (HUGE shoutout to FRC teams 6731, 10063, 1153, 4123, 11483, and 2423), which meant working through issues like roboRIO’s that kept shorting and radios whose age we could only guess. Our polycarbonate was supposedly dropped off at McGregor, but it vanished somewhere along the way, leaving us to build using just plywood and aluminum.
Though surprisingly, the lack of resources seemed to actually make the experience more exciting. Watching the electrical team open up the RoboRIO to troubleshoot the issue themselves, or seeing cardboard prototypes built as a method to save materials, reminded me of how creative teams become when resources are limited. It was also cool to know that we were showing other rookie and or low-income teams 01 This isn’t to say we weren’t privileged in other ways - particularly in our access to fabrication equipment. practical ways to address common challenges.
Another thing that stood out to me was how this experience brought together a group of students who, for the most part, didn’t know each other well to work on something that depended entirely on teamwork.
In a typical FRC season, you’re hyperaware of the personalities and strengths of everyone on your team. You know who’s best suited to design the shooter, who will stay for the late nights, who has the most experience with FRC as a whole, and whose judgement you trust most when a tough decision has to be made. That familiarity is one of the greatest strengths of working with the same team over a long period of time.
What surprised me was how well the opposite approach worked too. Walking into a “season” without any of those assumptions meant everyone felt more comfortable jumping in and contributing from the start. Mechanical, electrical, and software members were all sketching ideas, testing designs, and throwing out suggestions side by side.
MIT often says they select for students who are strong collaborators and true team players, but this was the first time I saw that philosophy play out in real time. Everyone was eager to help, open to merging very different ideas into stronger ones, and consistently brought positive energy into the space. Over the three days, I was introduced to many new concepts, and I never once felt uncomfortable admitting that I lacked experience. Instead, teammates spent hours explaining ideas, answering questions, and working alongside me until things clicked.
Turning a group of strangers into a cohesive team is rarely easy. I think the fact that teamwork became our greatest strength in just three days says a lot about the culture MIT fosters – and the people it brings together.
The final realization I came away with was, “how do teams spend six weeks doing this?” A thought that felt ironic, considering my own team often felt that six weeks wasn’t enough.
Being forced to complete the entire process in just three days made me rethink how I approached robotics in high school. and there are many things I now know I would do differently. Specifically, I think MIT ingrains in you the idea of “failing fast,” a mindset that runs counter to how my team, and I especially, preferred to work.
I’ve always been someone who wants to think through every aspect of a problem before jumping into a solution. I want my first attempt to be perfect, which usually means spending a lot of time analyzing the problem itself. But Robot in 3 Days made me realize that this isn’t always the most productive approach. Sometimes, failing quickly teaches you far more about a problem than filling page after page of Notability notes.
And finally, THE ROBOT (temporarily named TIM)
If you are interested in learning more about the robot and our design process, I HIGHLY recommend checking out our Chief Delphi thread. Here, you can find videos of us talking about each mechanism on the robot, ideas we considered using initially, and some embarrassing clips of me nearly breaking the robot.
I also highly recommend you watch our official robot reveal video because it’s SO COOL (trust)!!
If you are reading this and still haven’t watched it, go back and press the link.
Overall, Robot in 3 Days was one of the best experiences I’ve had at MIT so far – see you again this time next year (maybe with you as a member of the team!). And for all the teams competing – GOOD LUCK!