The engineering portfolio
The hard format rules, what belongs on the pages, and the mistakes that quietly cost teams awards.
By the end you can
- Meet the format requirements judges actually enforce
- Structure a portfolio that tells the story of a season rather than showing a finished robot
- Avoid the formatting mistakes that make content invisible to judges
On this page · 4 sections
The engineering portfolio is the single document that carries your team into every judged award. It is also where teams lose awards on technicalities that take five minutes to avoid.
Go deeper
FTC Portfolio Docs goes into detail on layout, page-by-page content, and printing. Look there for more insight.
The format rules
These are enforced, and breaking them makes work invisible rather than merely penalised.
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Length | 15 pages of content, plus one cover page |
| Cover page | Not counted, and not considered by judges — put nothing important on it except your team number |
| Team number | Must appear on the cover page |
| Page size | Standard letter or A4 |
| Minimum font | 10 point |
| Content window | Only work from a set date in the previous calendar year onward — check the current manual for the exact cut-off |
Judges are instructed not to follow links or QR codes
Anything behind a URL or a QR code in your portfolio will not be looked at. Not your website, not a video, not a shared drive of evidence. If it matters, it has to be on the page itself, inside the 15. Teams lose real credit every season by "saving space" this way.
Two more that follow from the same principle: anything after page 15 is not read, and anything on the cover page is not considered. Judges are explicitly reminded of both. If your best outreach numbers are on page 16, they do not exist.
What goes in it
A great portfolio tells the story of your season, the problems you ran into, the decisions you made, and the results you got. It is not a showcase of a finished robot. A page of beautiful renders with no reasoning behind them scores worse than a rough sketch next to an explanation of why you rejected it.
A workable structure, given 15 pages:
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Team introduction. Who you are, your structure, your region, how long you have run. One page.
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Engineering process. How your team actually works — design cycle, decision-making, how a problem becomes a solution. This frames everything after it.
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Robot design journey. The bulk of the document. For each major mechanism: the problem, what you tried, what failed, what you measured, what you chose and why.
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Software and control. Autonomous strategy, sensors, what you tuned and how you knew it worked.
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Outreach and impact, with numbers. Events, people reached, whether it is sustained or one-off. This is your Reach evidence.
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Sustainability and business. Funding model, budget, sponsor relationships, recruitment, leadership succession. Your Connect and Sustain evidence.
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Team plan and goals. Where the team is going after this season.
Open Section 6 of the Competition Manual, read the criteria for each award you want, and check that something in your portfolio visibly answers each one. Judges are scoring against those criteria. A portfolio that never mentions how the team will survive its founders graduating cannot rank for Sustain, no matter how good it looks.
Make it readable
The most common failure is not missing content — it is a wall of text that a judge skims in ninety seconds and retains nothing from.
- Cut the text, keep the substance. Judges read a lot of these, under time pressure, straight after your interview.
- Use photos, diagrams, CAD screenshots, and data. A labelled photo of a failed mechanism next to two sentences beats a paragraph describing it.
- Show iterations visually. Version 1 → version 2 → version 3, side by side, is instantly legible and demonstrates process better than prose.
- Include real numbers. Cycle times, students reached, dollars raised, mass saved. Specifics are credible; adjectives are not.
- Apply your brand kit. Same fonts, colours, and logo as everything else your team produces. Consistency reads as an organised team.
Print it and read it on paper
Judges usually read a printed copy, at a table, quickly. Colours shift, thin fonts vanish, and a layout that works on a laptop can be unreadable in print. Print a draft early and have someone who has never seen it try to find your outreach numbers in thirty seconds.
When it is read
Your portfolio is reviewed after your structured interview ends and your team has left the room. Judges have dedicated time between interviews to read it.
This has a practical consequence: the portfolio and the interview should reinforce each other, not repeat each other. Use the interview for the story and the energy; let the portfolio carry the detail, the numbers, and the evidence for the claims you made out loud.
Check yourself
Your portfolio is at 15 pages and you still want judges to see your full outreach photo album and season video. What do you do?
That is the document. The room is harder, and it comes next.
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