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Last Updated: September 21, 2026
Understanding how we handle your data, how our scoring methodology works, and what's coming next for FTC Coach.
At FTC Coach, your team's intellectual property and privacy are of utmost importance. We have designed our system to collect only the data necessary to provide and improve our service.
Standard analysis sends your PDF to Google Gemini without saving the PDF or generated feedback to FTC Coach server storage. A local browser cache lets you return to your work. If you explicitly consent to Community Hub publication, the submitted PDF and feedback are checked and stored as a pending submission. They become publicly viewable and downloadable with your team and season details only after admin approval. You can request modification or takedown from that portfolio page.
We do engage in minimal data collection on our backend to help us monitor usage and improve the platform. The data we store includes:
If you choose to submit a portfolio to the Community Hub, it remains pending while an admin reviews it. Once approved, the portfolio and its analysis become accessible to everyone (public).
You are free to claim these stats for any outreach purposes if it is your own portfolio. You are only allowed to upload your own portfolio.
If you want to request a takedown, change your mind after uploading, or if someone else uploaded a portfolio without your consent, please use the Request Takedown feature on the portfolio page.
This will initialize a manual review process to remove the portfolio from the Community Hub.
We reserve the right to update this Privacy Policy at any time. Any updates will be posted on this page with a revised "Last Updated" date. We aim for complete transparency about what we store. If you have any questions about the data associated with your team number, please contact us.
Our analysis engine is built on a foundation of official FIRST Tech Challenge documentation and real-world award-winning portfolios. Here's exactly how we evaluate your work:
Our award guidance follows the 2026–2027 BIOBUZZ Competition Manual V1, Section 6, reviewed September 15, 2026: Inspire, Think, Connect, Reach, Sustain, Design, Innovate, Control, and optional Judges' Choice. We distinguish required criteria, encouraged criteria, and FTC Coach recommendations. FIRST uses qualitative judging and deliberation; our 0–100 weights, strictness settings, and contender thresholds are internal estimates. CAD, engineering depth, quantified examples, GM0 advice, and winning-portfolio patterns remain valuable coaching guidance without becoming extra FIRST requirements.
To ensure our feedback reflects championship-level standards, our system utilizes anonymized reference portfolios from past award-winning teams at regional, state, and world championship levels. These references are stored securely and used solely to calibrate our AI's understanding of what constitutes high-quality evidence, proper documentation depth, and effective storytelling. We never share these reference portfolios publicly or use them for any purpose other than improving analysis quality.
When you submit a portfolio, our multi-stage analysis pipeline executes as follows:
Important Disclaimer: AI analysis is a supplementary tool and does not guarantee award success. FIRST judges use the Initial Interview, follow-up interviews, and portfolio where applicable, under the published criteria. Inspire, Think, and Control require a portfolio; other scored awards do not. Practice questions are based on prior official resources, not the unreleased BIOBUZZ question bank. Check the current Judge Resources for updates. Our feedback should be used as guidance to improve your work, not as a definitive prediction of judging outcomes.
FTC Coach is actively evolving. Here are some of the features and improvements we're working on:
The Community Hub is now live. Teams can optionally submit portfolios for public sharing after a safety check and admin review. Standard analysis remains private unless a team explicitly chooses to publish.
Live portfolio review sessions with experienced mentors and award-winning teams. Get personalized, in-depth feedback beyond what AI can provide.
Comprehensive guides on portfolio creation, award strategy, interview preparation, and more. Written by teams who have won at the highest levels.
Expanding our platform to support FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) portfolios and awards. This is in active development and will launch soon.
Running AI analysis at scale is expensive. We're looking for sponsors to help fund backend processing costs and keep FTC Coach free for all teams. If you or your organization would like to support the FTC community, please reach out to vantarobotics@gmail.com.
The official FIRST materials are publicly available. Our 0–100 scoring weights and coaching recommendations are FTC Coach methodology, not official FIRST judging scores. However, we have chosen not to open source the website codebase itself for several important reasons:
We believe transparency in methodology is more important than open source code, and we're committed to explaining exactly how we operate.
We're always looking to improve! FTC Coach is built for teams, by teams. If you have feature requests, bug reports, or general feedback, please reach out to us:
We're happy to add features that help teams succeed!
Yes! In the near future, we plan to make tools for FRC, such as the Impact Essay generator and other various resources we are actively working on. FTC Coach is our primary focus for the time being, but we'll be sure to let you know when we need beta testers or when we launch our FRC tools.
For standard analysis, no. FTC Coach does not upload your PDF to permanent server storage or save the generated feedback on its backend. Your browser caches a local copy for convenience.
Exception: If you explicitly consent to publish to the Community Hub, your PDF and analysis are checked for safe sharing and stored with your team, season and award details as a pending submission. They become publicly viewable and downloadable only after admin approval. Automated checks can miss personal information; review your submission yourself. You can request modification or takedown from the public portfolio page. Takedown removes public listing access; it cannot recall copies already downloaded by others.
We only save minimal metadata (team number, timestamp, which features you used) to improve the platform.
Great question! We use your browser's Local Cache (saved locally on your own computer) to remember your portfolio between sessions. This smart caching means:
It's like a "Save" button that only exists on your computer, nowhere else.
Our prompts use current FIRST criteria alongside engineering advice and patterns from prior award-winning portfolios. Scores use FTC Coach’s internal 0–100 model, not official FIRST point values. However, AI analysis is a supplementary tool and does not guarantee award success. Judges make final decisions based on your complete presentation, interview, and portfolio. Use our feedback as guidance, not gospel.
Absolutely! You can use our Chat feature to ask general questions about portfolio creation, award criteria, and FTC strategy without uploading anything.
We're here to help. Reach out to Vanta Robotics at vantarobotics@gmail.com.