The team that’s proud of a portfolio of mistakes

Ask Toby Osborne what FIRST^® Tech Challenge is really about, and he doesn’t reach for the robot first. He reaches for a folder.

Toby leads three FIRST^® Tech Challenge teams at Bournemouth School for Girls and passes on his expertise as a Champion Organisation Ambassador for the South West.

He’s been running teams for years – long enough to have started one from scratch knowing next to nothing, and to have seen what it does to young people.

Here, he explains what the programme actually teaches – and why the moments the team are proudest of are the ones where things went wrong.

“This is the portfolio for the team this year,” he says, flicking through it. “It has countless mistakes written in it. What they’ve done wrong, what they had to change, what they thought was rubbish.” “Making mistakes is the point because that’s engineering. That’s the tech industry.”

Most of what young people hand in is meant to show their best work. This is a portfolio of everything that didn’t work – and it’s what the team is proudest of.

“Making mistakes is the point because that’s engineering. That’s the tech industry.”

The shiny, happy side

That instinct – to show only the polished version – is everywhere his team members look. “What people put online is generally the shiny, happy side of things,” he says. “But that is not real life.” They’re the same age as other young people scrolling social media full of perfect outcomes, finished products, and careers that look effortless from the outside.

Real life, in Toby’s club, looks like a robot that gets built, fails and gets rebuilt – sometimes for months – before it works. The programme doesn’t tidy that away. It puts it on paper and hands it in.

Some of Toby’s most capable young people are also the ones who find it hardest to be seen getting something wrong. Week after week, the programme asks them to do exactly that in front of their peers, and then try again. “It’s fine if they get it wrong,” he says. “That’s the whole thing.”

The quiet ones

The mistakes are only half of it. What Toby most enjoys talking about is what happens to the young people who make them.

“We get a few team members each year who are quite introverted,” he says. “Year one, they don’t say much at all. They’ll take part, they’ll do their thing.” Then, somewhere along the way, something shifts. “Within a few years, they’re leading a team.” Other teachers notice it too. “I’ve had teachers walk past and go, is that so-and-so? And they don’t believe it.”

That’s not something you can rush, Toby explains. Confidence gets built slowly – with a real team around you and plenty going wrong along the way. It’s why those young people keep coming back, he says. They’re getting something out of it that they weren’t getting anywhere else.

More Than Robots

Week to week, the work goes well beyond code. Teams cut metal, wire electronics and build a working machine to a brief, under time pressure, together. But the programme is More Than Robots. Team members own entire areas of the team – fundraising, reaching out to local businesses, inventory, making sure everyone and everything is ready for what’s next.

Some of them end up delivering outreach sessions to primary schools, designing and running assemblies. For Toby, that’s arguably the more useful skill of the two. “Being able to communicate to a hall of a thousand young people, plus all the teachers, is a much more transferable skill than the robot itself,” he says – and not one many other school activities can offer.

Easier than he expected

Toby didn’t arrive at any of this with a master plan. He first brought FIRST^® Tech Challenge into his previous school knowing, by his own account, almost nothing. “I had no idea what I was doing, which is the truth,” he laughs. 

What got that first team through wasn’t him. It was them. “The girls just went, right, we’re going to do this. And they did.” That team won at their event that very year.

“As long as you guide them, most young people are quite willing to pick it up.” His own role, he’d say, is mostly to set the scene and get out of the way.

Why it matters

At the heart of it, FIRST^® Tech Challenge is simple: a hands-on, team-based STEM enrichment programme where getting things wrong is part of the plan. In fact, teams write down their mistakes in a portfolio, hand them in and are proud of them.

But for Toby, the portfolio isn’t the best part. It’s the young person who wrote it – the once-quiet team member who ends up running the room. “She’s just owning it,” he says. “And it’s a great thing to see.”

Thinking about starting a team?

You don’t need to have it all worked out – Toby didn’t. Find out how to bring FIRST^® Tech Challenge to your school.

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