How do you advance from a qualifier?

A small number of Award winners will be invited to advance to the Semifinal or Championship at each qualifier. If your goal is to compete against the best teams in the city, here's all of the info you'll need to learn how you can advance.

Team Rankings

At each qualifier, teams are ranked against each other in four categories: Robot Game Performance, Robot Design, Innovation Project, and Core Values. Each category ranking is worth exactly 25% of your combined ranking. A small percentage of the top ranked teams will receive a Golden Ticket, which gives them entry to the NYC Championship. A larger percentage of the top ranked teams will receive a Silver Ticket, which gives them entry to the NYC Semifinals. These percentages will be updated once we know how many total teams are competing in FLL Challenge this year (November).

We will be welcoming 24 teams to each of our two Semifinals this year and our Championship will host 48 teams.

Rubrics and Scoresheets

Teams are ranked by the results of their judging rubrics and robot game scoresheets. The following scores determine your rankings:

• The total score of your Robot Design rubric

• The total score of your Innovation Project rubric

• The total score of your Core Value rubric

• The total Core Values score on your three Robot Game scoresheets

• The highest Robot Game score out of the three rounds you play (second and third highest scores are used to break ties)

Judging Subjectivity

Rubrics, by design, introduce a level of subjectivity to the judging portion of the competition. While the rubrics help level the playing field by setting expectations for teams, they are also flexible and free to interpretation. To help off-set the subjective nature of rubrics, NYC FIRST provides training to each volunteer judge, which includes a mock judging session to orient judges to the expectations laid out by the rubric.