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Last Updated: February 3, 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.
Your portfolio is never permanently stored. Due to technical limitations (Vercel's 4.5MB request size limit), large files are temporarily cached during analysis to ensure reliable processing. This temporary storage is used only to pass your file to the AI (Google Gemini) and is automatically cleared from your browser after use. We never access, read, or retain your portfolio content beyond the analysis process.
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 upload a portfolio to the Community Hub, then that portfolio will be accessible to everyone (public) for anyone to see, along with its analysis.
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 scoring criteria are derived directly from the FIRST Tech Challenge Game Manuals (Part 1 & Part 2). We parse your portfolio looking for the exact evidence judges are instructed to evaluate—including engineering notebooks, CAD documentation, sustainability initiatives, community outreach programs, and documented measurable impact. Each award category (Think, Innovate, Design, Motivate, Control, Connect, Promote, Compass) has specific rubric points that we check against.
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 make final decisions based on your complete presentation, interview performance, pit display, and portfolio. 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:
A community space where teams can optionally upload their portfolios publicly to receive peer feedback, ask questions, and collaborate. All sharing will be opt-in only—your portfolio remains private unless you explicitly choose to share it.
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.
All of the reference documents, official FIRST materials, and scoring rubrics we use are publicly available and open source. 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. Your portfolio is never permanently stored. It is processed and then discarded.
Exception: If you explicitly choose to publish your portfolio to the Community Hub, it will be stored and made publicly accessible. You have full control over this decision.
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 AI is trained on official FIRST documents and benchmarked against award-winning portfolios. 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 us at vantarobotics@gmail.com or monish.sd.2008@gmail.com.