Design
Turn ambition into a testable mechanism, program, strategy, or learning experiment.
FTC Team 36009 // Building the next frontier
Build Boldly.
Challenge Everything.
OtterBots, FTC Team 36009 at Lewis Middle School, educates students to build the next frontier—bringing students, mentors, families, and community together to turn human ambition into real capability.
Empowering human ambition
Exploring the Frontier, together.
Progress begins with people: students willing to ask difficult questions, mentors who share experience, families who create opportunity, and a community that believes young people can solve meaningful problems. Frontier technologies amplify curiosity and capability; they never replace thought, effort, or accountability.
Every student can become a frontier builder.The frontier advances when young people learn to ask better questions, master new tools, build with others, and take responsibility for what they create.
Problem solving that compounds
Design. Measure. Analyze. Improve. Control.
Progress is not a single breakthrough. It is a disciplined loop in which every test improves the next decision and every lesson becomes a foundation for the next student.
Measure
Capture timing, accuracy, reliability, behavior, constraints, and unexpected outcomes.
Analyze
Compare evidence with the goal. Find the bottleneck, contradiction, or failed assumption.
Improve
Change one meaningful variable, test again, and retain only measured progress.
Control
Make the improvement repeatable through feedback, documentation, training, and safe limits.
Agency
Students own the outcome.
Students define the goal, make the decision, test the machine, and accept responsibility for the result. Mentors and Frontier tools expand what they can attempt without taking ownership away.
Ubiquitous Intelligence
Insight at the point of creation.
Microsoft Scout connects research, code, design tools, testing, and publishing so students can bring the right context into the moment they are solving a problem.
Shared Intelligence // Second Brain
Experience becomes team capability.
Our LLMWiki transforms sources, decisions, experiments, contradictions, and procedures into durable team knowledge. Every student inherits a stronger starting point and leaves one behind.
Digital Twins // Physics simulations
See the forces behind every decision.
A robot does not move in abstractions. Mass, torque, traction, inertia, geometry, timing, and uncertainty all meet on the field. Digital Twins help students see those relationships sooner—and arrive at the physical robot with better questions.
Field-scale physics
Understand the system before optimizing the part.
Field geometry, travel distance, sightlines, traffic, scoring state, and alliance timing shape every mechanism we build.
Robot physics
Torque. Traction. Inertia. Timing.
We turn motor curves, gearing, mass, wheel behavior, launch geometry, and cycle time into hypotheses the physical robot can confirm or reject.
Measured reality
A model earns trust one measurement at a time.
Simulation proposes. Testing decides. Every difference between the Digital Twin and the field becomes a calibration task—and another opportunity to learn.
Learning through every attempt
Learn continuously. Improve deliberately.
We borrow the logic of reinforcement learning for team development: take a bounded action, observe honestly, reward reliable improvement, and update what happens next. Mentors guide without taking ownership. Teammates challenge and support one another. The result is a student who knows how to learn, adapt, and lead through change.
01
Code
Open every block.
Interactive diagrams, full comments, downloadable Blocks files, JavaScript, and student-friendly math explainers.
Visit Code Lab →02Our Work
Follow the whole journey.
Engineering decisions, control systems, professional learning, community resources, sustainability, and student ownership.
See what we are building →03Roblox Simulation
Test the strategy.
Use our Roblox Simulation to explore scoring cycles, traffic, parking, and alliance decisions.
Launch Roblox Simulation →Our season loop
Build capability that compounds.
Every technical choice becomes more valuable when students can explain the alternatives, evidence, result, and next decision. Microsoft Scout expands action; our LLMWiki preserves learning; human ambition sets the direction.
student@otterbots:~$ season-loop
01 → Ask a precise question.
02 → Design and document alternatives.
03 → Test the Roblox Simulation and physical robot.
04 → Measure, learn, and iterate.
05 → Let every student explain the evidence.