Twenty-two high school robotics teams from across Illinois competed at Naperville North High School last weekend in the state's first-ever FIRST Robotics Competition State Championship.

On June 12 and 13, students on the Huskie Robotics Team 3061, a joint program of Naperville North and Naperville Central high schools, organized and hosted the event. Their goal: give Illinois teams a competitive event closer to home.

"We notice that some teams down south may not be able to go to other regionals, or they go to regionals in other states, but we want to bring them more into the Illinois community," said Debabandya Dash, a Naperville Central senior on Team 3061. "So, this is really for any team that can possibly make it in Illinois, we invite them to attend."

The two-day tournament at 899 N Mill St., Naperville, featured the 2026 FIRST season game, REBUILT, in which alliances of three robots collect foam balls and shoot them into elevated baskets while climbing a tower for bonus points.

Teams build 115-pound robots in six to eight weeks after the game is revealed each January.

Team 3061 finished ranked fourth in qualifications with an 8-3-0 record and competed as the first pick of Alliance 2 before being eliminated in the double-elimination bracket's fifth round, according to The Blue Alliance competition database.

Roaring Robotics Team 2704, a community nonprofit team drawing 27 students from 14 school districts in the Naperville area, also competed.

Nooriya Rahman, a Wheaton Warrenville South senior and operations captain for Roaring Robotics, said the post-season format let teams study how competitors had modified their robots since the regular season ended in May.

"Even though we've seen and competed with them in the past, they probably have changed different things about the robots," Rahman told NCTV17. "We can learn more about what their goals are for the next season, so we can collaborate and learn about them."

The championship caps a banner year for both Naperville-area teams. Team 3061 made its fifth straight trip to the FIRST World Championship in Houston in April and won the Regional FIRST Impact Award at the Midwest Regional in Arlington Heights. Roaring Robotics qualified for the World Championship for the first time in more than a decade.

Huskie Robotics, founded in 2009, has grown into a 17-year-old program backed by corporate sponsors including Molex, Bosch, and the Gene Haas Foundation. The team runs LEGO building programs at local elementary schools to introduce younger students to engineering.

The program is also pushing for structural change. Team members are working with U.S. Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL), state Rep. Janet Yang Rohr, and state Sen. Laura Ellman to designate FIRST programs as career and technical student organizations in Illinois. That designation would unlock additional state funding and resources for schools running robotics programs.

Jinan Parves, a Naperville Central senior on Team 3061, told the Chicago Tribune in April that cost remains a barrier. "Obviously, we are very blessed to have tons of amazing sponsors that allow us to attend the world championships, buy all these materials, create these big robots, but obviously they're a little expensive," Parves said. "So in doing this we're able to kind of close that bridge even more and allow even more people to have access to these STEM resources."