Starting this Fall 2024, KTBYTE has offered a new offering to the robotics program called – a VEX Robotics Team! This is separate from the Robotics Club and SmartThings Programs which are referenced here.
To learn more about this new team competition based robotics offering, keep reading!
Our VEX team at their first competition in January 2025!
What is VEX?
VEX is a world-renowned competition series for middle- and high-school age students to have fun and learn valuable engineering skills. We began sponsoring a Middle School V5 team during the 2024 – 2025 school year. Our team will build a robot together to complete a task in competitions with other middle school teams
Who can participate? What are the age requirements for VEX?
VEX is good for students in middle school (give or take a year) with any amount of experience. Our team competes in the middle school division so students should be in 8th grade or below to participate. Students who are not in middle school yet, might be able to join with instructor approval.
My child has finished middle school but wants to participate. Is that allowed?
We might be able to make an exception for high school freshmen, depending on the needs of the team and instructor approval. For students in grade 10 or beyond, they will likely not be allowed to attend competitions as team members but might be able to join the team as an additional “coach”, which is a great leadership opportunity! In the future we hope to offer a high school team as well for those who want to participate at a higher level.
What do students do on a VEX Team?
Students are split between different roles on a VEX team. These roles will vary year to year but usually include building robots, programming them, and documenting the engineering process. Our goal is for everyone on the team to have exposure to the different roles on the team while naturally allowing students to drift towards their preferred specialities.
The KTBYTE VEX team attends weekly lessons on how to design their robot and compete in tournaments.
How many competitions will the team go to?
Our goal for our first year of offering the team was to compete in 3 tournaments including the Massachusetts Regionals tournament at the end of the season. In future years we plan to have more experience to draw from among our team members, which will allow us to compete more often. During the 2024-2025 school year it took until January for us to have a robot ready for tournaments, while in future years we hope to be able to reach that point by October or November.
How will VEX help students?
Students on our VEX team learn mechanical engineering and computer science concepts, as well as human skills like leadership and project management. This experience will be useful for any future learning or career in the STEM disciplines. Students will also learn the inner workings of the specific VEX competition, which could allow them to lead a team or compete in the high school division in the future! And while we prefer that students are excited to participate on the team for its own sake, experience working on a VEX team will look great for high school, college, NHS, and other applications.
What’s the difference between VEX and FIRST robotics competitions?
In deciding which team-based competition to offer, we were considering both VEX and FIRST. These are both well known competitions. Note that sometimes you might hear the competitions FTC, FLL, or FRC, which are all variations of FIRST.
We chose VEX because the nature of rules surrounding the robot building are slightly more regulated than FIRST. As a result, there is a more level playing field and costs are lower. Plus, our instructors at KTBYTE are more familiar with VEX, making it the clear winner in deciding where we could be the most successful.
In the future, we could offer different robotics teams like FIRST and are always open to feedback about what students prefer!
How are VEX learning goals different from the CORE classes?
At KTBYTE we are constantly evolving our curriculum. This is partially because computer science and robotics are rapidly evolving fields and it is important for us to evolve with them to meet the needs of our students. Our newest offerings at KTBYTE include VEX, GoDot, and Artificial Intelligence courses. All of our courses are taught by passionate and qualified instructors. In comparison with our Core classes, our newer offerings have fewer graded assignments and support options outside of class time, which also means the course fees are generally lower than other parts of our curriculum.
As a team offering, VEX is different from the rest of our curriculum in that there is no “next course” to progress to. Students can continue to compete on our VEX team each year while they’re in middle school, and we hope to be able to offer a high school team as well in the near future. If VEX students would like to try out our other courses, they’ll receive a personalized recommendation on which robotics or programming classes best fit their experience level.
I have more questions!
Feel free to give us a call at (818) 748-8848 or email us at info@staff.ktbyte.com . We have extensive customer support and are always willing to talk about VEX or anything else!