After a year of fine-tuning robots, debugging code, and working through long practices, the VEX Robotics World Championships stand as the final challenge for robotics teams around the world. From May 6-14, five teams from Lexington High School traveled to Dallas in order to participate in the competition. 

VEX Robotics is a robotics competition characterized by two-versus-two matches. In each match, there is an autonomous period where the robot acts entirely on a series of pre-programmed instructions, and a driver period where student drivers take over manually. In each match, the goal is to score as many points as possible. 

Prior to competing at VEX Worlds, teams spend the season laboriously preparing and gaining valuable experience. This can include rebuilding and recoding robots, as well as attending competitions.

“What you do before the competition is infinitely more important than what happens at the competition: making [sure] everything [is as] tested… and doing everything that needs to be done beforehand,” Peter Bai, a junior at LHS and a member of VEX team 8889a, said.

Each new competition season’s work is built upon the last. Knowledge and resources gathered from previous years aid the team in their preparation process.

“We’ve been building up this code base … Our team has had access to this code over the years, and I’ve been slowly adding on to it as I learned new techniques and successfully implemented algorithms,” Bai said.

Bai also reflected on shortcomings during the competition, describing the importance of time management and how it could have led to a more successful performance.

 “Time management is really important … it seems to always be that everything that goes wrong would have been solved by just doing more testing, having more time,” Bai said.

During VEX Worlds, socializing is also an important aspect. For example, the mechanism of alliance-building within the competition facilitated conversations between teams. 

“Right before alliance selections, you scout other teams, and you could go to your friends or teams that you have seen do well in the competition. A lot of it is outreach. You want to be known. You want to build a good reputation for other teams to pick you,” Claire Zhang, a freshman at LHS and a member of VEX team 8889s, said. For Zhang, the community aspect of VEX is her favorite aspect of the competition.

Participants hail from a large number of countries around the world, and so communicating with others can be especially valuable. 

“Because so many people from around the world come there, you’re able to meet a lot of new people and see how their culture is different and how their designs have evolved differently from your regions,” Jeremy Wang, a junior at LHS and a member of VEX team 8889a, said.

Regardless, VEX Worlds is a fulfilling experience for many.

“It’s a pretty unique experience, being able to do the [activity] that we’ve all spent so much time building robots or programming robots for at a very, very high level,” Bai said.