When competitors gather in Dallas next week (May 6-14) for the VEX Robotics World Championship, organizers expect 2,400 teams from 60 countries. The student competitors will range from elementary school all the way to college.
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About 1,000 teams of middle- and high-schoolers from more than 30 countries competed at the 2016 VEX Robotics World Championship in Nashville – shown in a WorkingNation video being re-released today – with some elementary-level competitions just added a year or two before.
But even though it’s grown, the basics of the competition haven’t changed much, says Dan Mantz, CEO of the Robotics Education & Competition (REC) Foundation, the nonprofit that has managed the event for the past 15 years (it started under different management in 2008).
‘A Little More Pizazz’
“VEX Worlds looks very similar,” he says. “There’s probably a little more pizazz right now. I think the pits are decorated a little bit more. We definitely have a lot more teams, so there’s a lot more people. But overall, the thing is the same.

“What the students said in that video, I think you would get similar responses from students today,” he adds. “I think students would talk about the iterative design process, that they had to build a lot of different versions of their robot to qualify. … And I think they would talk about their career aspirations. It was almost like a time capsule that if I showed students today, you could see them nodding their head.”
As in 2016, all the students gathered at VEX Worlds this year will be competing according to a robotics challenge theme. For high schoolers in 2016, it was “Nothing but Net,” and competitors had to design robots to gather projectiles and hit targets to score. This year’s theme will be “High Stakes,” which involves designing and deploying robots to pick up rings and put them on stakes.
Competitors Gain STEM Insights, Sponsors Court Next Generation
In both cases, Mantz says, the Northrop Grumman Foundation was the VEX Robotics competition presenting sponsor. However, he adds, in the interval since 2016, the number of VEX sponsors has increased threefold, and some may be courting the student competitors as their future STEM workforce.
“Many, many other Fortune 500 corporations have started embracing what we’re trying to do,” Mantz says. So Google, Tesla, Texas Instruments, Eaton, all those companies are now large sponsors of our programs. And the reason they’re sponsors of our programs is they want these students.
“I think in 2016 we talked about the needs for tomorrow’s workforce,” he adds. “Well, that workforce is today, and these companies want to hire our students now. They don’t even wait for them to graduate from college. They hire them as high school interns, definitely as co-ops and internships in university, and then they’re making generous job offers to these students when they graduate.”