Giggle Pickles Need You for World Championship

They already won their golden ticket. Now they have to figure out how to get there.

Everyone loves an underdog story, and there isn't a better underdog story than that of the Giggle Pickles—a motley crew of 13 sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade who form a robotics team from Ferndale Middle School in Ferndale, Mich., one of Detroit's oldest inner-ring suburbs. Somehow, these kids managed to WIN the Michigan middle school robotics championship, not six months after their first meeting of the season!

Because so many of the team members were brand new to robotics, many would meet weekly in the summer of 2024 to start learning the basics of programming and building. They ended the year winning the middle school robotics championship at the Michigan FIRST Tech Challenge State Championship–SE tournament—aka, States—held in early December at Macomb County Community College. Winning, though, might be an understatement. “Dominated” is the better word.

After winning their state qualifying tournament, the Pickles burned through the 72-team roster at States, racking up 12 consecutive match wins without a loss through regulation play and the playoffs—the only team in the competition to do so. A few matches were close. Some were come-from-behind, and some were blow-outs. They beat several more established, experienced teams, including former champions and those from some of the wealthiest middle schools in the most engineer-dense enclaves of Michigan.

The Giggle Pickles finished the season with an incredible 95% match win rate. After States, their season performance ranked them 25th among all FTC teams in the world! That would be more than 7,000 teams in over 60 countries.

How to explain it? Great coaching, for sure, from a core of three volunteer mentors, including FTC Michigan “coach of the year” Nick Kokotovich. A really good robot design. Dedicated parents. But mostly it was the Pickles themselves, and their commitment to mastering the fine art of robotics competition. That demanded long hours of work building, coding, tearing down and rebuilding their robot, steely nerves in a junior college

gym packed with thousands of shouting spectators, and maybe most important, an unshakable confidence that would impress the likes of Michael Jordan and Tom Brady. Nobody, and we mean nobody, thought the Pickles could win. Except the Pickles.

Why should you care? As Michigan state champs, the Giggle Pickles get an automatic invite to FTC's world championship in Houston, April 16-18, 2025, where all the best robotics teams come from around the globe to vie to be the world's best. The entry fee alone is $2,500. The estimate to get the Pickles, coaches, chaperones, their robot and spares to Houston for four days is about $2,000 per Pickle, on a shoestring. While some Giggle Pickle families might be able to absorb an extracurricular expense of that magnitude, others simply can't. The Pickles have decided that everyone is going to Houston, or no one is.

The Giggle Pickles and their parents will be hard at work brainstorming, knocking on doors, and soliciting local sponsors, but they can’t afford professional fundraisers. Every dollar will help, and that's why we're here, hat in hand. If you can contribute $5, or $25, or even $1, you'll help this unlikely collection of young engineers toward achieving a dream—a dream that six months ago wasn’t in the realm of possibility.

So, can the Pickles win in Houston? If they get there, almost certainly not. Most FTC teams from outside of Michigan are made up of high schoolers, including the best from Taiwan, Germany, and all points on the globe. And most have a lot more experience. For the Giggle Pickles, Houston is about learning, the experience, and the dream.

Of course, that's what Pickle parents and mentors were thinking last summer, too. No one remotely believed the Pickles would be Michigan state champions.

For more information, please visit Gigglepicklesrobotics.org and watch our video on youtube: https://youtu.be/OrdiLGV68o8