Youran Pan has been involved with FIRST Robotics since she was in Grade 9 at Vincent Massey Secondary School in Windsor.
Now a senior, she's ready to make a splash and lead some of the newer team members in her final year of the program.
"I just want to have fun with it. It's about learning and community and just finding like-minded people," said Pan, who is looking to study Mechanical Engineering next year.
"A lot of the techniques I'm learning here and the mentorship that I'm getting is going to be really helpful for post-secondary and my career after that," Pan added.
She's among hundreds of students on 10 teams across Windsor-Essex and Chatham-Kent who are participating in this season's competition, themed ‘FIRST AGE – Rebuilt.'
Those students gathered at St. Clair College's Student Life Centre on Jan. 10, 2026, for the worldwide release of this year's challenge.
"Everybody in the world finds out at the same time what the game is," said Larry Koscielski, the chair of Windsor-Essex First Robotics. "The first hour or two after the game is announced, everybody's off in corners, scribbling stuff. So, the next week or so will be strategy."
Koscielski is involved with Windsor-Essex FIRST Robotics alongside his wife, Sheri Lynn Koscielski, because they believe the life-lessons and real-world skills enshrined in FIRST help foster great relationships as well as a skilled workforce.
"This is a lesson in ‘how do I get things done with nothing,'" said Larry Koscielski, noting the pressure of the competition is very real-world in a competition which touts "Our organization invents, inventors."
"There's not enough money, there's not enough people, not enough information," Koscielski said. "But get over it, because that's the way the world works. What you put into it is what you get out."
St. Clair College Senior Vice President John Fairley was on hand to provide sponsorship of $1,000 to each of the 10 participating teams, which will go towards sourcing materials and resources to build this season's robot.
"We're glad to be part of this. We've been part of this from the very beginning. Our doors are wide open for you," said Fairley. "We have great faculty here and we meet you where you're at."
Nicholas Driedger, a teacher at UMEI Christian High School and lead mentor for the schools' FIRST Robotics team, says the event brought a lot of excitement, with students eager to get started on the project.
"This is building a lot of skills that they really otherwise wouldn't have," said Driedger. "Our school is quite small, so we don't have any of the trades programs or anything like that. So, this is a way for them to get involved with working with tools, drills, and such. And watching them by the end of the year, knowing tools and what to do, putting things together, is extremely rewarding."
Driedger competed in FIRST Robotics while in high school and studied in the Electrical Apprenticeship program at St. Clair College. He said the competition is about a lot more than the robot.
"They see the robot, but they don't see everything else: the PR, the finance, all of the business skills that you have to build up, which I always think is a bit of an oversight," he said. "It's providing the students with opportunities to be involved in all different aspects of FIRST Robotics across four years, in ways that you can't get in the classroom."
The first competition takes place in early March and provincials are in the second week of April – followed by the World Championships in Houston, Texas.
While winning is always a goal, Grade 11 student Biao Biao Huang said he's developing soft skills that will stick with him for a lifetime.
"You do learn a lot of hard skills, like CAD programming, but I think the soft skills are most important, especially presentations, interviewing with the judges, talking to people and scouting," he said.
"It's what's really important about a person. This is the best program to learn soft skills and how to just develop as a person."
