Our summer camp ran two weeks, Monday through Friday, 9 to 1. The first week was all FLL, run with GNCE Organized Anarchy 26112, and we were in the room to help. The second week we split the building with GNCE Mercury 26413: FLL was ours to run, VEX was theirs, and we worked their side too.
The FLL track was an advanced one, built on SPIKE Prime kits around BIOGLOW, the 2026-2027 season. Students worked missions against the real ruleset, so programming and mechanism design were scored the way a tournament scores them. That is the difference between a team that can build a robot and a team that can score with one, and a week is just enough time to see across it.
Every day at noon the mission work stopped for an engineering challenge. One problem, a clock, no worksheets. Breaking up the morning was on purpose: a mission is something you cannot fail at quickly, and the noon challenge is something you can, so students got to be wrong at 12:15, right by 12:45, and carry that back to the table with them.
The VEX track in the second week was for students who had never opened a VEX kit. Same schedule, same noon challenges, different parts in the bin. It is there because of who an FLL-only camp loses. A student who spends a week on SPIKE Prime and likes it has to go find the next thing alone, and most of them never do. With VEX in the next room, the next thing is already in the building, run by people they have already met.
Mentors were in at 8:45 every morning, before any of it started, which is the part of a camp nobody photographs.
Both weeks closed with a scrimmage, robot against robot, which is the only score that has ever really mattered in this sport.
We also ran a free afternoon at the Weston Public Library this summer, for anyone with no robotics experience at all. That one has its own post. This fall we expect to run VEX alongside FLL instead of as a summer experiment, and the FTC side is getting an academy: the same shape as these sessions, far deeper, and running long enough to actually build somebody.