FTC Competitive Robotics

February 2025

My first experience in competitive robotics was through a program called First Tech Challenge (FTC). FTC is a worldwide competition where a team of students have to build a robot that takes input from a PS5 controller to do certain tasks. Each team must do tasks as many times as possible in 2 minutes and 30 seconds. Along with 15 other students from my grade, I signed up to be on the school team.

I quickly took a critical role in the 15 student team, taking charge of team decision making, assigning roles and ensuring the subteams were working in lockstep. During this time, I grew my leadership skills and learned valuable lessons on leading a team where many team members aren't fully engaged. I believe the biggest thing I learned is that even though more than 2/3 of the team was not engaged originally, once they saw a small cohort of us making progress, it inspired them to dive in and help, accelerating our progress. 

Before this season of robotics, I had never even been on a team of this size, much less led one. In our final competition of the season, my school's team finished 2nd in the competition's overall ranking, the furthest any team from my school had ever gone.

Read my article about strategies I learned here.

Malice and Mercy

June 2025

When my startup Empty Console first came together, we connected over the programming language we learned in school, p5.js. At the time, this was the only language we all knew well, so we chose it for our first competitive game jam. Our game Malice and Mercy earned an "honorable mention” - equivalent to winning 2nd place in the competition. 

Malice and Mercy is a platformer, which has become a popular video game type ever since the original release of Mario. This game plays with the ethical questions of life, where at the end of each level, the player is forced to either choose to kill or save a person to optimize time and points. Killing gives less points but rewards a much better time than saving. Along with this twist, the game gives the player three throwable abilities to get through each level as fast as possible. We created our own gravity and throwing physics in order to maintain full control of player motions. Along with our physics, we also fully coded our tilemap, collisions, particles, and level editor, without using an engine.

Competing in this first game jam helped us three cofounders of Empty Console learn how to work as a team in a competitive environment. We learned how to manage our time, how to work in shifts, and how to decide on a winning idea quickly.

You can read my post on the experience of building Malice and Mercy here, and the post from the jam's host here. To play Malice and Mercy, click here.

Space Looper

August 2025

For Empty Console's second project, we created another video game, this time for the Game Maker's Tool Kit game jam, one of the biggest game jams in the world. The GMTK jam is hosted on itch.io and the year we competed got an astonishing 9,645 submissions. The jam lasted only 4 days, and participants were notified of the theme of the jam only at the start of the 4 day timer. This year's theme was "Loop".

The GMTK jam was our first attempt at a competition with a short time frame. We scored #623 in narrative, #975 in audio, #986 in creativity, #1480 in art, and #3180 in enjoyment.

Rushed for time, we chose to work in the language we all know best, p5.js. Space Looper is a strategy game with a simplistic goal - circle meteors in space using rope and collect them across 20 research centers scattered around the universe. While creating this game, we aimed to challenge the mind as well as the precision of the player. The player loses if they run out of either energy to fuel their ship or if they run out of rope, which is needed to collect meteors. Both materials are required to play so the player must keep a good balance between waste and use of each material.

Creating this game was a vital experience for Empty Console and taught us so much about working effectively under pressure and in a short time frame. For example, we learned that we need to do a better job checking for bugs before submitting. In this competition we accidentally left a small bug where certain buttons are not clickable at times after the game has already been played through more than once. 

To play Space Looper click here.

Bugged Out

September 2025

As Empty Console's third video game made for a game jam, Bugged Out was made for the 2025 Patch Notes Game Jam with the theme: The Error is the Feature. This is the first year of the Patch Notes Game Jam and only lasts a total of 3 days, the shortest time frame we have had to work with so far. Our submission placed 17th of 454 entries (9th in the other scoring platform) with 17th in theme integration, 18th in gameplay, 24th in fun factor, 38th in art, 46th in sound design, and 71st in innovation.

The hardest part of the game jam was definitely coming up with an idea related to the theme given. If the main concept is too buggy, then it makes the game annoying to play. If the main concept is not buggy enough, the game no longer fits within the theme. In the end, we decided to make a platformer with "glitched" platforms being the focus of the game. With each color representing something special, completing Bugged Out requires a smart player with good logic, good memory, and good reflexes.

While making Bugged Out, Empty Console's teamwork improved a lot, this being our second fast paced game jam meaning we were more organized compared to the GMTK Game Jam. We also learned how to manage feedback from players on Itch.io, an important skill that will be necessary for future projects.

To play Bugged Out and visit our Itch.io page click here.

Congressional App Challenge

October 2025

The Congressional App Challenge is a challenge where small teams of students create a working prototype app or website that serves a social purpose. Innovations submitted to the Challenge are judged by the congressman of each district, and a winner is selected for every district in America.

With Empty Console, I am designing a website for the Congressional App Challenge that will help local musicians earn higher revenues from live performances via real time tipping. The use case came to us from a popular local band in the SF Bay Area. According to bands we've interviewed, high admission fees discourage people from attending local band concerts. When people attend however, they typically have a great time and leave feeling that the admission fee was worth it. Our website, called Open Stage, aims to reduce the upfront admission fee to increase audience size, then enable real time tipping during the show, increasing overall revenues to the band and venue space. We would partner closely with the venues and bands to enable ticket sales, management and communication with concertgoers. You can view our Figma prototype here and our website here(changed after submission).

After a month, results were sent out and we learned that Open Stage scored third place in our district, CA-15, which is one of the most difficult of the nation. With this position, Empty Console will meet and discuss Open Stage with Kevin Mullin, our district's representative, in early 2026.

Current Projects

Spatial AI in Robotics

Recently, AI has taken over the world with new bots and neural networks being created every day. Already, every industry is being affected in countless ways. Still, most people's experience with AI has been in the digital realm. The next wave of AI will bring it into the physical world, i.e. spatial AI. It is already in development and will enable AI to understand and physically navigate the real world. 

For my year-long individual school project, I plan to build an AI robot that can understand verbal instructions, identify objects and carry out actions in the real world such as fetching. I plan to use YOLOv11x, a 2D camera, an Adafruit ultrasonic sensor, OpenAI Whisper, Raspberry Pi, External Motor Controller Amps, and REV Robotics motors. You can read my project proposal here.

FTC Competitive Robotics

For the second year in a row, I am a part of my school's FTC team. This year the goal of the game is to build a robot that can launch a pickleball upwards consistently and efficiently. With a task like this, there are many ways to do it just off a chassis base. Our current and past ideas include: Catapult, mechanism similar to baseball/tennis machine, or even a spring.

Another big part of FTC is the outreach factor, which consists of doing some sort of robotics social service during the season. For our outreach, we are currently helping a less experiened team that is also based out of our school. We will most likely look into other robotics teaching programs for the future as well.

Even though I played a critical role last year, I am a lot more experienced this time around with robotics in general and also being a part of a big team. Based off last year, I have a few goals: Score well, work efficiently, and make sure everyones voices are heard. Me and my team are currently working on fully designing and building our idea for a launch and intake mechanism. We are also still slightly tweaking our chassis.

Future City Competition

In the Future City Competition, teams must try to design a city to maximize the type of lifestyle citizens would have. Also, teams must also think about a yearly problem, this year the challenge being minimizing food waste. For every entry teams must create a project plan, an essay under 1500 words, a model with one moving part, and a live presentation. In order to do well, teams are required to think about every aspect of any city. This year that means plans for food waste, water, food, trade, military, energy, working area/downtown, a residential area, public transport, and so much more.

I am registered with five other classmates from school and we created almost a full design of our city, which is an island located somewhere similar to off the coast of northern California. We have started working on our essay and model as well as always updating our project plan. Read our current project plan here.