FLL Challenge's Innovation Project (and FTC's Engineering Portfolio) isn't a robot. It's kids picking a real problem, researching it, designing a solution, and pitching it to judges. Done well it wins awards; done rushed it embarrasses everyone. Here's how to structure it across a 15-week season.
Each FLL season has a theme (past examples: Submerged, Masterpiece, Superpowered). Within that theme, your team has to:
Weighting varies by season, but the Innovation Project consistently sits alongside the Robot Game and Core Values as one of the three biggest judged elements — roughly a third of the total score in most recent FLL Challenge seasons. Check the current season's official FLL scoring rubric for the exact weights and rubric items. Teams that ignore the Innovation Project until December are teams that go home from qualifiers with no advancement.
Most rookie teams treat this as "we'll do it later." Then in Week 10 they scramble to research a problem, invent a solution, and pitch it — all in three weeks. Judges see it. Kids know they didn't do their best work. Prevent this by making it 20 minutes of every meeting from Week 3 onward.
Treat it as four sequential phases, one per month of a 15-week season:
Watch FIRST's theme reveal video with the kids again. Then a whiteboard session: "What's something in [theme] that we could imagine being different?" Every idea goes up. Don't judge. 15 kids, 15 ideas, no editing.
Kids group similar ideas, vote to keep 3. For each candidate: name a specific person or group who lives with this problem. If they can't — kill the idea. The Innovation Project rewards specificity ("a diabetic teenager who forgets insulin") over abstractions ("people who need healthcare").
Have kids draft: "Our project helps [specific group] solve the problem of [specific issue]." This sentence changes 3 times over the season — that's fine. Getting version 1 down forces commitment.
Example: "Our project helps middle-schoolers with peanut allergies avoid accidental exposure in their cafeterias."
Kids find at least 3 sources on their problem: articles, videos, or interviews. One of them must be an interview with a real person — a parent, teacher, doctor, coach, neighbor who has direct experience. This is the source judges care about most. Set it up now; it takes 2 weeks to schedule.
Coach's job: set up the 20-minute call/visit. Kids' job: prepare 5 questions, ask them, write down answers. Do NOT let a parent take notes. Do NOT let the coach interject. Kids will get halting answers — that's OK. They'll learn faster than any curriculum.
Reread the interview notes. What surprised the kids? What was different from what they'd assumed? Rewrite the one-sentence problem statement — it should now be sharper. This is version 2.
Give kids 15 minutes to sketch anything — napkin drawings, sticky notes, 3D printed prototypes, mockup apps, physical objects. Rule: at least 5 different approaches must be sketched before the team picks one.
Team picks the solution to develop. If you can reach the expert from Week 7 for a 10-minute follow-up ("would something like this work for you?"), do it. Their feedback becomes part of the pitch: "we asked X and they said Y, so we changed Z."
Physical: cardboard mockup, 3D print, drawing. Digital: mockup app screens on a phone. Service: a poster explaining who does what when. Judges reward "we built something we can hold up" over "we wrote a paper."
Structure: (1) Who we are, 30 sec. (2) The problem, 60 sec, name a real person. (3) Our research, 60 sec, name the expert. (4) Our solution, 90 sec, show the prototype. (5) What we'd do next, 60 sec. Every kid has at least one part. Nobody has more than 90 seconds of talking.
Recruit 3 parents (not the coach) to play judges. Give them the actual FIRST rubric. They ask hard questions: "How is your solution different from what already exists?" "What did the expert think of your prototype?" Kids will freeze. That's the point.
Now the pitch should feel smooth. Every kid should be able to answer "what problem are you solving and why does it matter?" without notes. Bring the physical prototype to tournament day — judges pass it around.
Current FLL rubric uses four levels for each area: Beginning · Developing · Accomplished · Exemplary. Here's what "Accomplished" looks like on the four Innovation Project criteria:
| Area | What "Accomplished" looks like |
|---|---|
| Identify | Team clearly explains the problem, who it affects, and why it matters to them personally. Not "we chose this because our coach said so." |
| Design | Team's solution is well-thought-out and addresses the actual problem. Prototype is functional or clearly-communicated (physical, digital, or diagrammed). |
| Create | Team can show what they made and explain the design decisions. "We chose material X because Y." "We picked interface Z because our expert said..." |
| Iterate | Team shares how the solution changed based on feedback. Names the expert or user who shaped their thinking. Shows version 1 vs version 2. |
If kids can't name their expert or can't describe what the expert said, judges know the team skipped Phase 2. Judges have seen every version of "we watched a YouTube video and it inspired us." Real people talking to your team is the whole ballgame.
FTC doesn't have an Innovation Project — it has an Engineering Portfolio, judged separately. Different structure, but same principle: judges are looking for evidence that the team documented their design process across the season, iterated based on feedback, and can explain their decisions. The 4-part arc above still works: Identify (the game problem you're solving), Research (what other teams have tried, what your control system supports), Design (mechanical + software + strategy), Iterate (what changed after each League Meet).
See the 15-week season planner for how the Engineering Portfolio maps onto the FTC calendar.
Print the FIRST Innovation Project rubric (or the FTC Engineering Portfolio rubric) and physically hand it to the kids in Week 5. Not the coach, not the parents — the kids. "Judges will use this to grade you. What do you need to be able to say?" This one act moves the average team's score by 15%.
