Collaboration is at the Heart of Robotics Competitions

One of the many benefits of high school athletics is the desire and inspiration to get better. Beyond the positive aspects of teamwork, exercise, skill building, leadership and goal-setting that playing on a sports team provides students, competing against other teams helps both teams improve. Observing how other teams function, the plays they run, how they approach competing in general and against your team in particular, all provide useful ideas and information. While teams are serious about competing, once the contest has concluded, opposing team members return to being friends and neighbors.

Robotics competitions provide all of the same aspects as each team competes against the clock, the task and, yes, each other. Robotics competitions also inspire, educate and improve every competing team simply through each team member observing how others tackled and completed the meet’s challenge. While competition is important, collaboration is the real benefit of robotics competitions.

Competitions are a significant part of the purpose and goals of a robotics club. They can also be the reason a school starts a robotics club, solely to represent the school in those meets. The preparation for these competitions can provide your club or a team not only short-term but long-term goals for their efforts.

Many clubs have more than one team compete in each meet or have different teams prepare for different meets. The challenge of each meet gives each team the impetus to explore, examine, develop and test new ideas – new ways of not only programming their robots, but in how they are designed and constructed.

Because the challenges of a meet are task-based, every team will have a different approach to accomplishing the challenges. Some challenges result in every team having very similarly constructed and programmed robots, but many bring out the diversity in thought that is possible in this activity. Despite the competitive component of the meet, students are very willing to share how they designed, built, modified and programmed their robot, more proud of their efforts than worried about coming in first.

There are dozens of robot competitions for high school (and middle school) students. Many are international and involve teams from countries around the world. They center on local competitions where high school teams each accomplish a challenge using their own robot design and programming. Teams that are successful at that level get to compete at the next level, sometimes with the same challenge and others with a new challenge.

Competitions move from the local level to state, regional, national and international, usually all within a single school year. These competitions are organized by robotics organizations such as FIRST, VEX, DARPA, RoboCup and World Robotic Olympiad. Their challenges can involve movement, material selection and placement, and activating another action, like shooting a paper airplane at a target. Some competition organizations specialize in certain types of robots and activities such as aerial (building robotic planes) or aquatic (boats or subs).

Becoming part of a competitive organization has other benefits for your robotics club in addition to providing the competitive challenge and meets. Many offer grants to help you fund your robotics club, access to equipment and materials, some specific to each year’s challenges, and connections to many of the technology sector sponsors that support robots in schools knowing that their next generation of employees are there now. Being connected to the organization also connects you to the group’s leadership who can assist with grant writing, preparation, training (for the advisor as well as the team members), and the other local, regional and state member schools.

Unlike so many other competitive aspects of high school, collaboration and networking is at the heart of robotics. Team members and advisors are happy to share their ideas and programming with each other, proud of what they have accomplished and glad to demonstrate. That level of collaboration between teams and the support of the organization itself is not only key to each team’s success, but makes it possible for every team to feel successful even if it was not the fastest to accomplish the task given.

Every team wants to advance to the next level, but every team member wants the other teams to improve as well. No other competitive activity has as much support – financial and intellectual – before, during and after than robotics. Every team member comes out of every meet a winner.