This award, sponsored by AutomationDirect, celebrates the art of digital animation and its close relationship to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics).
The 2025 Digital Animation Award is offered to help encourage students to cultivate skills in design and creation of animation including, but not limited to, storytelling, creativity, use of computer software, and an understanding of different techniques and forms of animation. This award is open to all FIRST Robotics Competition teams.
This Year’s Theme: Dive!!
The 2025 challenge: Create an animation of “Dive” that celebrates your FIRST experience.
Reference: 2025 Submission Guidelines
Special Thanks to Theory Studios for doing the Judging again this year! Theory is an international team of animators and special effects artists.
2025 FRC Winner: Team 5468: Chaos Theory
Judge Comments: Very well done! We were blown away by the professional lighting and color grading, and we loved the stylistic 2D animated overlays. An all around very cohesive, polished animation with a cute story and beautiful visuals..
2nd: Team 1197 – TorBots Great job! We loved how the camera animation moved to the beat of the music. Fantastic use of color. Very stylish.
3rd: Team 293 – SPIKE Great set building, lighting, and camera movement – and we LOVED the very on-the-nose story.
The judges also asked us to pass the following comments along for some of their favorite animations because they all started where you are and remember how much they valued constructive critique along the way (these are in no particular order, no ranking).
FRC Team 1317 – Digital Fusion We fell in love with the beautiful hand-drawn style and heartwarming story.
FRC Team 3604 – The Goon Squad We were impressed with the stylish use of color, 2D animation, and pacing of the story.
FRC Team 339 – Kilroy Great use of composition and camera moves to tell a compelling story with an adorable fish. Well done!
FRC Team 9162 – ALL MIGHT Very polished lighting and set-building. The whole animation felt incredibly cohesive.
FRC Team 589 – Falkon Robotics Very cool use of mixed media for the style, and we loved the unique story!
FRC Team 1671 – Buchanon Bird Brains We thought it was a really nice touch that the birds are in the shape of the FIRST logo. Very stylish animation with effective storytelling.
FRC Team 5026 – Iron Panthers Incredible motion design! We loved the journey this animation took us on from start to finish with a great message at the end.
All 2025 FRC Submissions
2025 FTC Winner: Team 21460: Williston Robotics
Great job! We were impressed by your use of fluid sims (we know that’s not easy). Beautiful lighting, camera moves, composition, and effective storytelling.
2nd: FTC Team 27090 – Quantamania Robotics Very nice job! We were impressed with the 2d hand-drawn style with a great use of color and shading.
3rd: FTC Team 5053 – CART Great work! We were especially impressed by the smoothness of the stop-motion animation.
The judges also asked us to pass the following comments along for some of their favorite animations because they all started where you are and remember how much they valued constructive critique along the way (these are in no particular order, no ranking).
FTC Team 6282 – Simi Valley Robotics Very nice 2D animation – we were blown away by how fluid it was!
FTC Team 24622 – RamBots Purple Cute 2D animation – we really liked the strong, stylistic use of color
All 2025 FTC Submissions
Past Winners and Animations
2024 Winner (Team 3100) — All 2024 Submissions
2023 Winner (Team 836) — All 2023 Submissions
2022 Winner ( Team8334) – – All 2022 Submissions
2021 Winner ( Team8592 ) – – All 2021 Submissions
2020 Winner (Team 1317 ) – – All 2020 Submission
2019 Winner (Team 846) – – All 2019 Submissions