About the Challenge

The FIRST Global RoboCo Challenge is an Olympics-style, international robotics competition that took place digitally in RoboCo, a digital robotics sandbox game created by Filament Games in collaboration with FIRST Global. With this special event, FIRST Global teams had a world-exclusive first chance to become the ultimate RoboCo Champion! Running from 1 November to 18 December 2021, the Challenge tasked participants with playing RoboCo on their computers, capturing their best attempts at each round.

Challenge Overview

The 2021 Season

Season Structure

The Challenge season was divided into 3 rounds of competitive play: Qualifiers, Playoffs, and Finals. The team that made it all the way to the Finals and won is the Season Champion.

Round Structure

Each round of the Challenge started when the game board was released. Game boards are objective-based scenarios (AKA puzzle spaces) in RoboCo. Each board was comprised of 1 main objective, 2 sub-objectives, and 5 “secret” objectives, and each was associated with one round of the Challenge.

Each round of the Challenge started when the game board was released to participants. Once participants downloaded the game board, they worked to score as many points as possible by building a robot, completing objectives, and submitting videos of their best runs.

To complete each round, FIRST Global and Filament Games streamed a video broadcast of all participants’ Challenge runs, complete with announcer commentary and scoring for every team.

Scoring

For each round, scores were generated from a mix of in-game quantitative results and qualitative judged scores. Each objective was weighted and each team’s grand total determined their standing in the Challenge.

Quantitative Total + Qualitative Total = Grand Total
(Max Value 20000)

Scoring Breakdown

In the game, quantitative results are generated during the team’s run and include the following criteria.

Scoring criteria

In addition to the game-generated results, our expert judges reviewed team submissions and scored them based on the following qualitative criteria and detailed judging rubric.

Qualitative criteria
Judging rubric

Round Results

At the end of each round, FIRST Global and Filament Games streamed a video broadcast of all participants’ Challenge runs on YouTube and Twitch. The results can be viewed on our results page with links to rewatch the broadcast any time.