The 2025 FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is making waves with its new theme centered on water exploration and conservation. On January 4, the robotics team, DuRT, joined teams across St. Louis for the season’s official kickoff, unveiling this year’s game, REEFSCAPE, and its unique objectives.
This year’s challenges include placing coral on a reef, delivering algae into a net, and docking on a cage during the endgame. Teams earn more points for coral placed higher on the reef, rewarding more complex and well-designed robots over simpler designs. Algae can either be launched into the net by the robot or transported to a processor, where a sideline player throws it into the net. The endgame involves robots fastening themselves to either high or low-hanging cages, with low cages offering the highest point value.
“What we’ll do as a team is we’ll try to pick three of the tasks to do and maybe not try to do all five,” DuRT coach Robert Behm said. “If we try to do all five, generally we can do none of them well. It’s better to do three things well than five things not well. It’s a cooperation game. You have three teams on an alliance, and the idea is to find teams you interact with well.”
The team meets after school from Tuesday to Friday and plans to jumpstart their robot’s design as soon as classes resume. Participation is open to all students, and no prior experience is required.
“I really like this year’s sea exploration-themed approach,” team member Liam Jones ‘27 said. “It feels different enough from other years to sound fun and new while being simple enough for us to excel. We have a lot of senior leaders this year, and I think we’ll capitalize on that. I’m really excited to see what we can do this year.”
