VEX Robotics Educators Conference

Turn everyday lessons into high-energy competitions that motivate students and deepen learning. In this workshop, you’ll explore practical ways to design classroom-ready VEX IQ competitions that reinforce core concepts, encourage teamwork, and keep students excited from start to finish.

Bring real-world relevance into your CTE classroom with robotics. This session highlights how VEX CTE supports career pathways, industry-aligned skills, and authentic learning experiences that connect classroom instruction to workforce expectations.

Experience the new VEX AIR platform from the learner’s perspective. Through guided, hands-on activities, you’ll explore flying in the VEX AIR Simulator, piloting the physical drone with the VEX AIR Controller, and coding the drone using VEXcode AIR.

Help students take ownership of their learning. This workshop focuses on strategies for building meaningful self-assessment practices using VEX GO, empowering students to reflect, set goals, and grow through intentional feedback and iteration.

Explore how artificial intelligence concepts come to life using the AI Vision Sensor with VEX EXP / V5. You’ll engage in hands-on challenges that build computational thinking, connect algorithms to intelligent behavior, and help students understand how AI vision systems work in the real world.

Ready to bring AI into your classroom? This session introduces VEX AIM through engaging activities that demystify AI concepts and show how students can interact with intelligent systems in meaningful, age-appropriate ways.

One robot, three powerful coding approaches. Discover how physical touch coding, physical card-based coding, and app-based programming with VEX 123 can support different learning styles, grade levels, and instructional goals—all while building strong CS foundations.

Teach computer science beyond the screen. This workshop uses the VEX CTE 6-Axis Robotic Arm to explore programming, automation, and systems thinking, helping students see how CS concepts drive modern manufacturing and industry.

Experience the new VEX AIR platform from the learner’s perspective. Through guided, hands-on activities, you’ll explore flying in the VEX AIR Simulator, piloting the physical drone with the VEX AIR Controller, and coding the drone using VEXcode AIR.

Level up your programming workflow. Learn how to use VEX Visual Studio Code with VEX IQ to write, manage, and debug robot code—while preparing students for authentic, industry-style coding experiences.

When systems get complex, debugging gets real. This fast-paced session challenges you to diagnose and fix issues under time pressure, building practical strategies you can pass on to students working with advanced EXP / V5 projects.

Crack codes, solve puzzles, and escape the vault. In this immersive, escape-room-style workshop, you’ll use VEX AIM to apply computer science concepts like logic, sequencing, and data analysis in a highly engaging problem-solving experience.

Help students move beyond trial-and-error debugging with VEX IQ. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll work with paired projects—one functioning and one intentionally flawed—to practice systematic troubleshooting through observation, code comparison, and targeted testing. You’ll explore how to design productive bugs that challenge without discouraging and treat debugging as a collaborative, reflective process—leaving with a ready-to-use protocol for your classroom.

Level up your programming workflow. Learn how to use VEX Visual Studio Code with VEX EXP / V5 to write, manage, and debug robot code—while preparing students for authentic, industry-style coding experiences.

Explore the real-world capabilities—and limitations—of AI vision systems through hands-on experimentation with the VEX AIM robot. In this workshop, you’ll play with the built-in AI Vision Sensor to see how it detects, interprets, and sometimes misinterprets its environment. Through project-based exploration, you’ll gain practical strategies for helping students understand what AI can do, where it falls short, and how to teach these concepts in meaningful, accessible ways.

Using VEX GO, educators build a short robot behavior and design a “failure artifact” for peers to solve. Teams plant bugs across modalities (build, code, sensors), trade projects, and debug together, treating the buggy model as an object-to-think-with and object-to-share-with. The emphasis stays on process over product: articulate your reasoning, test hypotheses, and capture routines that make collaboration the default.

Explore how vision systems are used to verify and validate tasks in automated environments using the VEX CTE Workcell and the AI Vision Sensor. In this workshop, you’ll investigate how object detection and AprilTag decoding can be applied to monitor task completion and system performance—mirroring how vision is used in real-world automated workcells. You’ll leave with practical ideas for bringing authentic industrial automation concepts into your classroom.

Experience the new VEX AIR platform from the learner’s perspective. Through guided, hands-on activities, you’ll explore flying in the VEX AIR Simulator, piloting the physical drone with the VEX AIR Controller, and coding the drone using VEXcode AIR.

Build foundational computational thinking skills that support early AI understanding using VEX 123. This workshop focuses on helping elementary students explore how robots sense and interpret the world, emphasizing the AI4K12 Big Idea of *Perception* by comparing human senses to a robot’s sensors. Through engaging, age-appropriate activities—and interdisciplinary connections to subjects like art (such as hue values) and students’ real-world experiences—you’ll learn how to introduce these concepts in a developmentally appropriate, meaningful way.

Turn everyday lessons into high-energy competitions that motivate students and deepen learning. In this workshop, you’ll explore practical ways to design classroom-ready VEX EXP competitions that reinforce core concepts, encourage teamwork, and keep students excited from start to finish.

Extend the capabilities of VEX AIM by connecting robotics with modern AI tools. In this advanced workshop, you’ll use VEX AIM’s Wi-Fi WebSockets feature to run Python code locally, send real-time commands (such as driving, turning, and object manipulation) to the robot, and stream video from the AI Vision Sensor back to your computer for custom vision processing. You’ll explore how this workflow enables integration with external services—including large language models—opening the door to powerful, flexible, and authentic AI-driven robotics applications. Advanced programming experience is recommended.

Explore how artificial intelligence concepts come to life using the new VEX IQ AI Vision Sensor. You’ll engage in hands-on challenges that build computational thinking, connect algorithms to intelligent behavior, and help students understand how AI vision systems work in the real world.

As VEX EXP / V5 systems grow more complex, effective debugging becomes essential. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll compare a working baseline robot to an intentionally flawed version to practice systematic troubleshooting through testing, code review, and mechanical inspection. You’ll experience repeatable “debugging by design” routines that help teams clarify intent, gather evidence, and iterate with purpose—leaving with practical workflows and norms you can apply immediately in your classroom.

Experience the new VEX AIR platform from the learner’s perspective. Through guided, hands-on activities, you’ll explore flying in the VEX AIR Simulator, piloting the physical drone with the VEX AIR Controller, and coding the drone using VEXcode AIR.

Step into Col. Jo’s world and use VEX GO to strengthen students’ engineering design-process habits through a story-driven challenge. In this hands-on workshop, educators complete a three-part animal rescue sequence—designing a ladder to reach an elevated animal, building a raft for a pond rescue, and redesigning the solution to become mobile with wheels. Along the way, you’ll practice planning with sketches, testing and iterating on designs, and sharing reasoning through a simple debrief protocol you can bring directly back to your classroom.

Explore how data can be used to inform decisions in robotics using VEX EXP / V5 and Python. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll investigate ways to collect, organize, and analyze robot data to better understand system performance. You’ll focus on using data to evaluate results, identify patterns, and guide improvements—leaving with flexible strategies for introducing data science concepts through meaningful robotics experiences.

VEX AIM challenges a familiar assumption: even when a robot “works,” it may not be doing what the designer intended. In this collaborative workshop, you’ll intentionally design AIM behaviors with hidden flaws, then exchange projects to analyze what the robot perceives versus what the original designer meant. Through shared troubleshooting, discussion, and iteration on both environment and code, you’ll experience how productive failure builds persistence, resilience, and learner agency—while walking away with facilitation prompts you can use immediately with students.

Turn debugging into an engaging challenge. Participants design playful, game-based debugging activities that motivate students to slow down, think critically, and embrace mistakes as a powerful part of the learning process.

Your automated workcell is running—but something isn’t right. In this scenario-based workshop, you’ll diagnose system-level issues in a simulated smart factory, applying real-world troubleshooting skills using VEX CTE.

Experience the new VEX AIR platform from the learner’s perspective. Through guided, hands-on activities, you’ll explore flying in the VEX AIR Simulator, piloting the physical drone with the VEX AIR Controller, and coding the drone using VEXcode AIR.