(upbeat music playing)

VEX Robotics Educators Conference. The infrastructure for all the wonderful things that you see here today is all a result of the very hard work that happens 12 months a year by the REC Foundation. This effort is led by my friend, Mr. Dan Mantz. We are very, very thankful for all the hard work he does every single year and everything that he contributes. Many of you mentioned initiatives like Girl Powered and all the wonderful things that the REC does. Again, that's because of his leadership. So, thank you, Dan. Thank you for coming a little bit early. Appreciate that.

(audience clapping)

Thank you for everything that you do.

(audience cheering and clapping)

(audience clapping)

Thank you, thank you. Jason, that was a very, very generous introduction. I always feel fortunate every year that I get to be introduced by Jason because his book and his philosophy on how we should be doing STEM education is truly inspiring. I know my staff reads it, and I hear a lot of good stuff. So, I'm always honored. I'm really privileged to be here again today. This is my third time.

Before I get started, how many people here have heard of the REC Foundation? Hey, it's getting better every year, Jason and Tim, so this is good, yeah. It's great because you know who we are, and it's bad because it's not a hundred percent yet, but hopefully by the end of today, you'll realize what we do.

So again, my name is Dan Mantz. I am the CEO of the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation. I'm going to be up here for about 20, 25 minutes. Then I'm going to bring two students up because I can tell you all day what the REC Foundation does and try to explain why robotics is important. But when you hear it from two amazing students who have been part of our program, you'll get a true picture of what it's about. So I'm going to go for about 10, 20, 25 minutes, and then I'm going to turn it over to them. Thanks for having me.

The mission of the REC Foundation is to provide every educator— and I usually bold that, I'm asleep this morning— but every educator with competition, education, and workforce readiness programs to increase student engagement in STEM and computer science. At the REC Foundation, our programs are for the educator. Ultimately, the end user is the students, but the programs are for the educators. We provide resources, training, in-person support, and online support for our REC Foundation programs, which are primarily the VEX Robotics Competition.

The vision at the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation is to see a future where every student designs and innovates as part of a team, overcomes failure, perseveres, and emerges confident in their ability to face global challenges. What does that mean? This is something we wrote at the REC Foundation a couple of years ago. We're huge believers in the iterative design process. When you walk around and see the students here at VEX Worlds, the robots they have are not the ones they built back in September. They have been designing, competing, failing, and overcoming those failures with new designs and new iterations to have these world-class robots. We truly believe that overcoming obstacles and persevering is the biggest skill we are teaching these students, and that's why it's so important to us.

The values of the REC Foundation are passion, integrity, and excellence. I won't dwell on this, but I do want to give you a little bit of numbers about us. First of all, we were started in 2010. The history for the REC Foundation is VEX Robotics Innovation First International developed this incredible competition.

People all over the world were saying, "Hey, we wanna support this and how can we do that?" So iFi Dex worked here with a gentleman, and they created a 501C3, and we were incorporated in April of 2010. We actually just celebrated our 15-year anniversary last month. It's kind of cool for us. It started with three employees 15 years ago, and we are now at 137 employees. We have employees in 36 different states, and support employees in Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. We're really excited about that.

Our vision of how we do our competitions is a little bit different than other robotics programs and other drones programs. We oversee the competitions. If you're sports people, think NCAA or Little League Baseball, something like that. We actually rely on our event partners to run the events. As a matter of fact, the REC Foundation only runs one event ourselves, and that's the VEX Robotics World Championship. All our other events are conducted by our event partners. I see a few event partners in the room here, and I really appreciate the support you give us. If it wasn't for our volunteers, we would not have a program.

This past year, our event partners hosted scrimmages and workshops such as the Girl Powered Workshop. All told, we had 26 million volunteer hours this year, between our coaches and our event partners. I just did the numbers last week, and we redo them every day. So 26 million hours, our dedicated volunteer base contributed to this program.

A recap of our season: for the first time ever, we exceeded 50,000 teams participating in the VEX Robotics competitions. I have another slide that breaks it down by program. It's incredible for us, and we're really, really proud. We're proud to partner with VEX Robotics to provide these incredible programs. We had 16,000 coaches in our system this year, and they gave over 12 million hours leading VEX Robotics teams. We have programs now in 109 countries. Last year it was 99, so if you saw me present last year, the number was 99. I knew we'd hit a hundred, and we got to 109 this year.

Some of the breakdowns: VEX GO. Has anybody here seen the VEX GO Robotics competition? It's an absolutely incredible competition for early elementary school. It's classroom-based, school-based. We don't have a qualifying structure that advances to a state championship or a world championship, although some places do that. We had roughly 19,000 VEX GO teams this year. For IQ, which is third through fifth grade in elementary, we had 8,910 teams. One thing I do want to say for the record, we zero our accounts every year. We don't do a running total or any of that stuff. We start at zero every year.

For middle school, which is the VEX IQ program, as well as VEX V Five, we had 12,077 teams. We had 9,566 high school teams. That's what the competition is these couple of days. The REC Foundation also has a drones competition called the Aerial Drones Competition. This was our fifth year, and we had over 2,200 teams. Our AI competition is just starting to take off. We're getting lots and lots of interest. We had 76 teams, and we actually have our AI championship coming up in June, with teams from 13 countries coming to that. We're really excited about that as well.

We have a university program called VEX U. It's probably, honestly, you're not supposed to have favorites, but I absolutely love that program. Those students in the university do some incredible things with these robots. We have 341 teams. Then there's the Factory Automation competition. Hopefully, you all saw the Workcell CTE. The Workcell program, the FREC Foundation actually has a competition that we do, and we have a leaderboard.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us throughout the years. Your dedication and passion have been instrumental in our success.

We look forward to many more years of innovation and collaboration. Thank you for being a part of our journey.

It's usually done in the class or in the school. The teams actually record their videos. We give them a challenge, and they record it, and they upload it. Last year, we had 3,218 teams participate. We also do SkillsUSA and TSA. Those competitions are happening next month. If you're a TSA school or a SkillsUSA school, we run their robotics programs. Finally, we have industry certifications, which I have a slide coming up on. We had 4,187 students year to date, but that number will skyrocket in the next month.

You are here at the VEX Robotics World Championship, and we have 20,000 student competitors. You'll see about a third of those as you walk around today. In total, 50,000 attendees will come through the doors over the 10-day period. We have participants from 49 states; Alaska did not come this year. I almost wanted to buy them a ticket and say, "Just come," so we could have all 50 states. We also have participants from 60 countries.

So, why VEX Robotics? At the REC Foundation, when we explain why you should do VEX Robotics, the biggest tagline is affordable, sustainable, and accessible. This is my third year doing this, and I used to always show a little bit of data. What I learned is you guys love the data. I actually have a couple of slides with new data that we just got a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to talk about that in this section.

First of all, the RECF. Our areas of focus are STEM education and robotics, which are by far our biggest programs. Then there's the Aerial Drones competition, one of our fastest-growing areas. We also focus on workforce development, our industry certs, and the factory automation competition. Here's the continuum: Elementary, as we talked about, includes IQ and GO. Middle school includes IQ, drones, and V Five. If you're TSA, TSA has both middle school and high school programs. In high school, we also do the JRTC Robotics competition. You'll see a lot of the JRTC students moving in. We have an incredible partnership with JRTC. That program is growing really fast, and there's lots of funding. If you're a JRTC school, you basically get to do robotics or drones for free. At the post-secondary level, as we've talked about, we have VEX U, factory automation, and the AI competition as well. We have lots of programs for different levels. We have something for everyone.

Okay, here's the data I was promising. Feel free to take pictures. Last year, I probably had a dozen people reach out to me and ask if I could send this data and more data. We will get the slide deck to everybody, so it's distributed to you. This first slide is the data I showed last year. It shows that 92% of the students who participate in RACF programs are more likely to take advanced STEM courses in high school or college. That's from a Michigan Tech study. 97% of their students showed more persistence and patience than their peers. 96% of students showed the desire to collaborate with their peers. Finally, 93% of students demonstrated a positive work ethic. That's from the Utah State University study. 83% of students were interested in taking engineering courses in college, according to a Georgia Tech study.

The data that I'm about to show you is brand new, and you're the first people in the world, besides the REC Foundation, to see it. Three years ago, we commissioned a study with CNM, based here in Texas. They've been surveying students and teachers over the past three years. We didn't want to report the data until we had a couple of years' worth of data. When my development team shared it with us a couple of weeks ago, I was beyond ecstatic. The data here that I'm showing you is from a decade ago, so it was good to get refreshed data. This is brand new from the CNM 2025 evaluation report.

Thank you for your attention and for being part of this incredible journey with us. We look forward to continuing to grow and innovate together.

88% of the students reported interest in taking additional math or science classes in high school or college. So, 88% of the students who are on a robotics team want to continue on a STEM path; they want to do math, they want to do science. 79% of the students showed interest in pursuing a STEM-related career. 93% of the students that are on the VEX Robotics team are doing better in their engineering and CTE classes. So, robotics in the classroom is amazing, and then reinforcing it with hands-on competition, after school or in school, is absolutely contributing to the success of these students.

86% of students reported they enjoy school more because of participating in the REC Foundation VEX Robotics programs. Think about that. 86% of students, because they're on a robotics team, are enjoying school more.

I have a personal story to share with you. My son, brilliant, you know, young mind, great at programming. Hated school, absolutely bored with school. I'm pretty sure he would've dropped out. Well, we probably wouldn't have let him drop out. But he really struggled with school. In ninth grade, he joined his robotics team, and they were required to maintain a B average and have a certain attendance policy. For the next four years, he did just what he could to stay on the robotics team. That's what his purpose was in high school, was robotics. And if you walk around today, and talk to these students in the pits, or on the fields, you're going to hear a lot of stories. Parents come up to me and they say, "Literally, being in VEX Robotics saved my child. They were floundering, they didn't have friends, they just wanted to do video games, or something like that. And being on a VEX Robotics team gave them purpose."

99% of elementary, and 97% of middle school and high school students reported they were having fun building a robot. So not only is robotics educational, and reinforces the design process, not only does it reinforce what we're teaching in the classroom, the students are having fun doing it. And finally, 95% of students responded that they felt a sense of belonging in the robotics community. It's very similar to the story I just shared. There's a lot of students in our programs. You know, we have our athletes, right? There's nothing wrong with that. We have students that do art. My daughter did robotics for five years, plus four years in university, and she's a state champion singer, loves to do musicals, stuff like that. And she loved robotics. But, for a lot of kids, this is their area that they belong. And the robotics community is really, really tight.

Matter of fact, I always said I wanted to trademark it, but in our community, the language is robotics. So when you're here, there's teams from 60 countries here, and you're going to see China talking to Germany, talking to Mexico, talking to US teams, and they're all collaborating, and they're all smiling, and getting along. It's incredible how robotics brings them together. I mean, one of my favorite things is I love to go to an event and see the kids from Maine competing with the kids from Alabama. So that's as much as a culture shock sometimes as internationally, right, so. So it's a true, true community in our programs.

I like this one. Program participants perform better in math than their peers. VEX Robotics students tested as advanced 30% more than the district average, and is proficient 23.5% more than the general population grades 6, 7, 8, and 10. So hopefully by now you're sold that doing robotics, participating in this as a hands-on activity, is really helping these students in the classroom as well.

So quickly, why robotics? Why the VEX Robotics program? There's many robotics programs out there, and I truly believe that students should do some type of robotics, some type of STEM activity, whether it's VEX Robotics, and other ones. But why VEX?

For those of you that have never had a team, the number one thing is it's affordable. We're probably the most fairly priced product on the market. Our parts are reusable. So once you invest, and we have lots and lots of grants to give out, but once you invest, the registration fee for our program is $200. So only $200. The cost of a competition last year averaged $55. And our program, at the minimum, we make sure that teams can go to three events. So it's really, really important to us. There's a lot of other competitions out there where if you pay a lot of money, you get to go to one event. So between a $200 registration fee, and if you go to three events, you know, you're talking $600. So, accessible. It's all self-paced.

The one thing about partnering with VEX Robotics is our education materials. I tell Jason and Tim all the time how much STEM labs have improved the REC Foundation. Those STEM labs have provided you educators with resources that directly go with the VEX Robotics competition. So we have four types of tournaments. We do an in-person tournament, that's by far most popular. We have in-person leagues. If you're getting into robotics for the first time, we highly encourage you to do leagues. And what it's nice is, if you have a league, you can build your robot, and you can meet, and maybe have two matches, and then the kids take their robots apart, they work on them, and then a week or two weeks later, you have another league event for another two matches, and you end up having a season's worth of matches, but you're doing it in your school without the stress. And then the top teams from leagues will often say, "Hey, we want to do this on the weekends, as well."

We have In-person Skills. Some people like the competition, the two V two or the two V zero formats. Some people just want to show that their robot is the best in the world, and we have these skills tournaments. We'll have them here where the robot is either autonomously programmed, or driving, and just to get the best skill possible. And then finally, for you, anybody here in rural countries, or rural America, where it's really hard to get to competitions, that's a big problem in the robotics community. There's a lot of rural teams, and there's a lot of places, for example, in South America, in Africa, that don't have consistent power. So we've developed our live remote skills, where we have cameras, and we film it live, and we run a tournament. The REC Foundation does it out of our Greenville office. And they get to have the experience of doing robotics without having to travel.

Just a couple of brief things. If you're new to robotics, and you're saying, "I love it. I see, Dan, you've sold me, this is going to really help the kids, but how do I become a coach?" Right? And through the generosity of our sponsors, specifically Google and NASA, we have a coach training summit series. So we basically have two RECF staff that are available every single day, except for Sunday. And they run different types of clinics where they train everything from how to build a robot, how to build a six-bar link, you know, different chassis. But they also teach you how to register your teams, how to prepare for your first event, how to do judging. What does the rubrics of judging? And so we have these every single day, you know, Monday through Saturday through the season. And sometimes we have a couple of people participate. We have some sessions where we'll have 400 people participate, so.

Has anybody in this room done the coach trainings? Yeah, I see a few hands. What do you guys think? Is it pretty good? Yes. Good, yeah. Is it online? Yeah, and I'll get a slide here, but we have lots of resources for you.

The other thing that I really wanted to talk about today, because I'm really surprised people don't know this about the REC Foundation, is we have industry certifications.

Thank you for your attention and participation. We hope you find these resources and opportunities beneficial for your teams and students.

Our oldest two industry certifications are now 10 years old. These are our pre-engineering and robotics certifications. We are certified in 15 states, and in Florida, we rank as the number two and number four certifications behind SolidWorks and AutoCAD. In Florida, when students earn our industry certification, schools receive additional funding. Last year, we partnered with the Society of Manufacturing Engineering and released our robotics and manufacturing fundamentals industry certification. We announced that PLTW is endorsing our industry certifications as part of their engineering programs, and ITEEA is also using our certifications for their programs. We believe this will lead to significant growth next year.

We are the global supporter of the International Robotics Honor Society, which we started eight years ago. Any robotics program worldwide can have their students recognized in this society. It's similar to the National Honor Society, with the same educators endorsing our program. This recognition is significant for students.

The VEX robotics platform is student-centered, which I love. It is designed to be easy for students to use without needing engineering mentors. We provide resources, and VEX Robotics provides resources for coaches to facilitate and support students. However, when it comes to building and working on the robot, we want the students to do the work. In 2019, we launched a student-centered initiative, which is a significant part of our judging and competition process. Educators and coaches support it, but students own the process and do the work. This approach is important because our data shows that students learn the most when they test their ideas, learn from successes, and persevere. The data supports this, and it is unique to the REC Foundation and VEX Robotics. You will see students actively engaged, with parents on the sidelines, which is our goal.

I've been with the REC Foundation since 2017. I remember Bob Mimlitch, Tony, and Paul Copioli asking if I could join the REC Foundation. I told Bob that I wanted to support VEX Robotics and shift the focus from just STEM to workforce readiness. My background is in rural Pennsylvania, where I grew up on a 30-acre farm. None of my friends went to university; instead, they pursued skilled trades like machine tool operation, HVAC, and diesel mechanics. They have been employed their entire lives. In rural Pennsylvania, we need people with engineering degrees and those who support the rural farming community and local machine shops. At the REC Foundation, we strongly believe in workforce readiness.

Thank you for your attention and support. We look forward to continuing our work together to empower students and prepare them for the future.

By the end of 2030, an estimated 3.9 million additional jobs will require proficiency in technical fields, and these will be created in the US. Right now, there's a risk of 1.4 million of those jobs going unfulfilled, highlighting a significant need. As you'll see on this slide, the median annual wage for a STEM occupation is $101,000. Whenever I show this, I have a whole bunch of educators say, "I'm quitting teaching, and I'm going to go get these jobs," right? So please, please stay. Do what you're doing. It's really, really important. The median annual wage is $101,650 compared to $46,680. If you don't believe me, it's on the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We actually look this up every year. The job growth is 10.4% for STEM jobs versus 3.6% for non-STEM jobs.

What we really teach in our programs, more than technical skills, is teamwork, collaboration, problem-solving, time management, critical thinking, and communications. Instead of me explaining that, that's why I brought much better speakers than me for that. At the VEX Robotics Competition community, the students are the heart of the community. I actually stole that from you. So, thank you. (laughing)

(Music cue)

Who's going to go first? All right, come on up, and introduce yourself. I want to introduce these two students right here. (audience clapping)

(Music cue)

Thank you. (audience clapping)

Just a quick background, the REC foundation has a student advisory board, where we select 12 students globally, and they serve as an advisory board to me, to make sure that we're listening. Sometimes the RECF could potentially operate in a vacuum, so we have 12 students that ensure I'm listening to them. The two students we have here today are from the student advisory board. So, Jeanelle, go ahead.

Hello, okay. Good morning, everybody. Hi, I'm Jeanelle, and I'm from San Diego, California. I've been a VEX competitor for the past eight years, and I've attended the world championship each season. VEX Robotics has given me the opportunity to see this beautiful event every year since I was eight years old. I'm 16 now, and I'm a sophomore, but I've been around for a really long time. I competed for two years in VEX IQ for elementary school, two years in middle school for VEX IQ, and when I was in seventh grade, I did my first year in high school VRC. This is my fourth year of high school VRC, and I'm just really glad to be here.

My favorite part about VEX is that it offers a really diverse perspective through its accessibility. Through this, I've learned some really valuable lessons that I can't really learn anywhere else. I've always wanted to be a doctor, and when I tell other people that I don't want to go into engineering, despite my seasoned background in robotics, they tend to be pretty shocked. But to me, my biggest draw towards VEX is that I'm able to gain competitive experiences while still being really immersed in STEM education, growth, and development. VEX doesn't just teach me how to build a robot, but it teaches me how to communicate with others, collaborate with teams and people I've never met before, speak up for myself, understand failure and loss, feel the thrill and uncertainty of competition, and express my creative ideas in a way that I couldn't really do on a normal sports team.

As a private team, my parents have to shoulder every financial responsibility on the team, but VEX has always been really affordable and worth every investment. Project management is something I've grown so familiar with because of VEX, where I have to manage human resources, manage my inventory, and be a lot more resourceful with what I have, because you can't just spawn everything out of nowhere.

So if I'm limited on parts, I have to be able to build a robot that fits what I currently have with me, and that makes me more flexible to the real world. In classes, I'll have school projects where I might not have everything I want or have every person on my team that I want, but I have to make do with what I have. I learned that specifically from VEX.

Judging, as well, used to really terrify me. Having to talk to strangers about our design process while trying not to forget everything that I wanted to say was daunting. But after doing it again and again, I got a lot better at being able to explain things clearly and thinking quickly when the judges asked tough or unexpected questions. These skills really stuck with me. Now, I find it a lot easier to speak up in class, give presentations, or even just have conversations with new people about something that I don't know that much about. I'm years ahead in public speaking compared to my peers, and I can confidently say that it's because of how VEX has prepared me. When you're on a football team, or whatever, you're not having these interviews about these really in-depth processes.

I think it's so inspiring to be able to talk about the experiences that I had because they make me who I am, and without them, I wouldn't be who I am. I just love talking about it.

Another huge part of my VEX journey has been the people that I've met. I've grown up surrounded by teammates and competitors from all different cultures and backgrounds. What I've learned is that we all approach problems differently. Learning how other people think has helped me open up my own perspectives, not just in robotics, but in life as well. It's really easy to get caught up in your own bubble, but VEX constantly reminds me that there's no one right way to think. It's just nice to be able to see different perspectives. We all follow a very similar engineering design process to come to our robots, but we all have very different end results. That's something so cool to see in competition because you're never with the exact same person or exact same robot over and over again.

I would say that I'm considered more of a veteran member because I've been around for so long. But I love being able to go to competitions and see newer teams come up with innovative and really cool ideas that I myself could have never thought of. I think that's what makes VEX so unique because no matter how much experience you have, there's always ways for you to stand out and make a difference in your community.

VEX also never really gets boring because every year we have a new game that's released, and that keeps us on our toes. Once we think that we fully mastered a game and have a perfect robot for that season, VEX immediately throws us a new game. That's what I love about it because you're not playing the same game, you're not kicking around a ball for your entire life. You're trying to figure out new and innovative ways to solve the problem presented to you. You have to be able to work as a team, and sometimes we come up with ideas that not everyone you're working with likes, but you always have to find a solution to the problem at hand. It keeps you refreshed, and the competition never gets boring to me.

Of course, with competition, there always comes the loss. You don't always win in robotics. Sometimes your code crashes, and your autonom or blind spot breaks mid-match, and your robot can't fully function. But these are things that we have to learn to move on from because loss, and every bit of pain and failure, always is going to lead to another path forward for you.

It doesn't mean that you're at the end of your road, it just means that you can go back in your engineering design process, and revise, or plan, and repeat the process you've had over and over. And that's my favorite part of robotics because if you're stuck, if you're always winning, you're never growing. And that's why VEX is so unique because you're always learning something new, even when you think you already know everything. It's frustrating, but it's also beautiful because it mimics how life is.

Winning, everyone loves to win. Winning is, like, everyone's favorite part of robotics, usually, but you're not guaranteed victory every path in life, you always have to be able to understand loss. And VEX does that really great because if you have 10 matches in a day, you'll lose maybe five of them, but then you're going to win another five. And those wins and losses balance out really greatly to me. And if you don't get it right the first time, you can always do better later. These losses teach me to be a lot more open to rejection, and failure, from judging, and matches, because I know that there's still a path forward for me to walk on, and it's never the end for me.

VEX. It's an experience that I've grown up with. I've done VEX more years than I haven't. And I would honestly just say that, just go for it. I mean if even if you have no idea where to start, we all were there at one point. They're such a beautiful community, and, VEX, it's been my life for a really long time, and I really hope that other people are able to share that experience, just like me, as I age out of this.

So, thank you.

(audience clapping)

(audience clapping)

Thanks, Jeanelle.

(audience clapping)

And Sarina will be our second student speaker. Hi everyone, my name is Sarina Miller, spelled S-A-R-I-N-A, or, as I like to spell it, serine, alanine, arginine, isoleucine, asparagine, alanine. Yeah, that's my name in amino acids. This is my seventh year competing in VEX Robotics. And if you can't tell, I love biology. Now you might ask, "Sarina, if biology is your life's passion, why is your biggest extracurricular commitment robotics?" I'm here to tell you that robotics has aided me, in my pursuit of biomedical research, more than I could have ever imagined.

The takeaway I want to leave you with today is that VEX doesn't just train future engineers, or computer scientists, it trains students interested in all aspects of STEM. At its core, robotics instills a critical mindset of empirical processes. In order to support my team, I took a course two years ago to earn my certification in project management. One thing from that course that really stuck with me is the difference between defined and empirical processes. A defined process is like baking bread. You have a recipe, and you follow the exact steps you need to complete the task. More importantly, I believe a defined process has one key attribute: a defined answer.

However, in scientific research, we don't always have a clearly defined path or end result. That is where empirical processes come in. We must observe every step and test every reaction, learning, and adapting, along the way. I believe most school curricula teach defined processes. We learn to memorize content for exams and solve problems with explicit solutions. Even the majority of labs we do have a design method and result, created to demonstrate different concepts to students. As a research mentor of mine once said, "All the labs you do in school are made to work." To be sure, a defined process mindset is critical to help learn the fundamentals, but it obscures the real world applications of science. With empirical processes, we start with questions, and we don't know where the answers will lead. Oftentimes they lead nowhere.

Students aren't usually taught in the classroom that their experiments might fail, that they may need to go through many iterations to make progress, and that progress may not yield perfect results. Robotics is a unique opportunity for students to experience the frustrations and victories of trial and error firsthand and to get an insight into what experimentation is really about.

So when I stepped into the genetics and aging research unit at Massachusetts General Hospital last year for an amazing internship opportunity, I was surprised to find that the best preparation I had for that experience was not my previous classes in biology, but rather robotics. The experiments we ran and the data we collected did not always align with what we had predicted. Yet I understood how to take that data and redesign, as we'd say in robotics, to improve my results. The resilience to failure I built up in robotics gave me the mindset I needed to succeed in empirical research.

In robotics, we're not given a step-by-step instruction manual showing us how to build a robot. We are not told the optimal path for our autonomous runs or exactly how we should manage our tasks. No, all of these things must be discovered. Through my years in robotics, I've learned to take a challenge and tinker my way to a solution. I've learned to optimize through testing. This is the essence of the engineering design process. And when you break it down into its components: brainstorming, selecting the method, executing a design, testing, and redesigning, it sounds awfully like the scientific method.

Once I put the pieces together and saw the interconnections between these approaches, it inspired me to take my work in both biology and robotics to another level. We worked to discover a solution, whether that be to accomplish a robotics challenge or understand the mechanisms of a disease, through small increments of experimentation, adaptation, and iteration. Robotics offers students an opportunity to get a real insight into the applications of science and allows for true intellectual curiosity and excitement to grow because the answers aren't predetermined for us, and the possibilities for innovation are limitless.

These are the kinds of skills we need to promote for the future engineers, programmers, shall I say, scientists of the next generation. Robotics teaches the students the methodologies of research and experimental design. And that preparation is an invaluable complement to the traditional science curriculum.

I am so grateful for the community I found at VEX and for how it supported my learning, inside and outside the classroom. It has truly been one of the most transformative experiences on my academic journey so far. And I know I speak on behalf of all the students in the program when I say that we couldn't have done it without the support of our teachers and coaches. So thank you for all that you do, and all the best to you and your students.

Thank you. (audience clapping)

(audience clapping)

Wow, that was... That's amazing. Sarina, will you join me for Q and A? So the beauty of our program is Jeanelle spoke, right? And, I don't know if you saw, she immediately rushed out because she's on a two-person team, and she has a match coming up. So she thought she was going to have to miss it, and she absolutely was so excited about the opportunity to be here. But as soon as she was done, it's like, "I can go to my match now." So she rushed out.

But, you know, the best part of my job by far, besides working with Bob, is actually meeting the students, and I think you guys can see why, right? So we have some time, I would love to answer questions that you may have about the REC Foundation or about VEX Robotics, but I also know that you may have more questions for Sarina.

So we have a few minutes here if anybody has any questions or comments for us.

Yes. Question for Sarina. My students, right now, take the losses so personally, and I guess I just wanted, from the student perspective, what have your coaches done that has helped you build the resilience that you talked about?

Yeah, so I think first of all, as a coach, your job is to really take your students, and when they seem like they're being super anxious about matches and being really competitive, to take them over to the side and be like, "Hey, you know, it's okay, you got this." But I think also it's like a mindset. We often assume that life is just like school, where if we lose a match, we fail, like this is the end of the world. But I think you gotta realize that in the real world, in the industry, failure is so heavily built into every aspect of what you do.

I mean, I had mentioned my internship earlier that year. One really interesting thing I found in my internship is that every single research technician there was just like, "You're going to fail. No one gets it right on the first time." But when you build that environment and make failure something very comfortable, it really helps you go through and make sure that you are just ready to go and optimize solutions. You can't look at it as a school failure. Like if you fail, it's the end of the world. No, you have to see it as part of the process.

That's a great question. Matter of fact, I think we should add that to the library to help our coaches when they get asked that. That's a great question and a wonderful answer. Wow. Any other questions? This might be the most friendly audience ever.

Sarina, you talked about biology, robotics, and the interconnections. How do you see yourself using that in the future?

Well, I mean, today, biology has so many things that robotics can apply to. When we're talking about nanobots and also stuff like AI, like literally this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, talking about protein folding, the uses of the skills you learn in robotics are so applicable to biology. The future is going to be taking a lot of these things, like AI and robotics, and looking at a more interdisciplinary approach for them. Bringing them into the lab and using them in congruence with that to work to solve certain diseases, like cancer, or I did research specifically on Alzheimer's. But they were also talking about maybe using robots to go in, and a big thing that causes the pathology of Alzheimer's, they call it beta-amyloid plaques, is basically going into the brain and using some type of robot to take those out.

Anybody else? There's some, oh, hello. Talk about a great robotics coach whose teams have been doing it for a long, long time. I have no questions for you, Sarina, but I do want to commend you on the speech you just gave. That is what I see in the future for my girls. I want them to speak with such empowerment, with such belief in the work that they do. And I love that you're a girl, you're in STEM. I know we have a high lack of female representation.

(audience clapping)

You're going places.

(audience clapping)

And you make me so proud. Thank you so much. I'm pretty sure she's going to be my boss someday.

(audience laughing)

Anybody else have anything? So one of the things we'll do is we'll get that specific video, and we'll peel it out of just the PD plus side, and we'll provide it to the Girl Powered event, so that you have a video that you can show when you're doing your first Girl Powered event. So I think that would be really cool. You are okay with that? All right, great.

(audience clapping)

And so a little surprise is, you know, typically during the V Five Robotics high school event, and then the middle school, and JRTC, the REC foundation typically has funders that, you know, pay a lot of money to sponsor, and they get stage time. But we never ever had sponsors during IQ. So a couple years ago, the students that spoke on this stage, I'm like, you guys are really connecting with the audience. So we started having a student give the opening remarks during IQ, and Sarina will be giving the opening remarks at IQ this year.

(audience clapping)

So this was a good practice run for right? So. So, I know you all have a busy day. I'm so pleased that the VEX Educator Conference continues to grow.

One last pitch for the REC foundation. If you are interested in starting robotics teams, if you don't have it, or interested in drones teams, we do get a lot of support from our sponsors. There's Google grants, there's all kinds of grants out there to start teams, and in our program you'll get the equipment, you'll get the registration fee, and most importantly you'll get the coach support, because we feel that, for our teams to be successful, we need to make sure that US coaches are successful.

Dan, I actually have a question for you. So the REC was graceful enough to provide us with tickets for the finals this evening, and this is the first time a lot of our educators have been to World. So I was wondering if you could just, I know not everybody got a ticket, I know a lot of people did. We'll also have it live streamed, but could the two of you give your perspective of what the finals is like, as kind of a sneak preview for them?

Alright, I'll go first, because you're going to top me, so I need to go first, but. (laughing)

So, it's really, really exciting. I don't know how to describe it. I'll describe it from a business perspective. So every year I look at the budgets for this event, because, you know, part of my job is finances, right? We gotta make sure that we're sustainable, just like teams do. And, I'm like, "Man, we spend a lot of money for all the AV, and all the stuff in the dome." And if you haven't been in there, and you see it today, it's an absolutely spectacle. The AV company we hired, to do opening and closing ceremonies, does major concerts, like Coldplay, and stuff like that. So, from a perspective, you're like, "Man, this is a lot of money." But then when you walk into that dome, for opening or closing ceremonies, it's like a rock concert, it's like a Super Bowl. It's like seeing Taylor Swift, right? It's that amazing. And why it's important, why the excitement is important, because the students get really, really energized, and the data shows, when they experience that, even if they didn't have the greatest tournament, they're more motivated, and more energized, to invest more into robotics, and more importantly, they wanna recruit their friends for robotics. So for me it's like going to a rock concert or going to a sporting event. It's got that same effect. And the most exciting part, for the kids, is they get to see next year's challenge too, so.

Okay, I'm going to describe it from like what it feels like walking into the dome, which is the arena. Like walking into the dome, you have a bunch of people really excited. You go in. There's like thousands of people, all probably shouting, "Water game." You have people throwing balls, doing the wave, like so many different things. There's so much energy in that room for finals. And, I mean, you get to watch these teams who spent the last two days competing, working hard, spending so many hours just to get to that moment, where they get to go into the dome, and be like, "This is my time." And they go and compete, and everyone is there cheering them on.

And then we have the game reveal, which is probably one of the most exciting things, maybe my favorite part of Worlds. Everyone is just so hyped up by that point. There is nothing better than the energy of people all across the world, in the dome, getting ready for the next year's game. Afterward, when everyone walks out, it's all about discussing their strategies for next year. "I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this." It is truly an amazing moment, and something I look forward to every single year. So, yeah, please go. It's amazing. Energy's the right word. The energy is incredible.

The kids and the teams will actually, once the game is unveiled, start working with VEX to solve game element kits. There will be teams that begin brainstorming and designing as they're driving or flying back to their home cities or countries. A hundred percent.

So, Nicole. Okay, one more round of applause. That was absolutely incredible.

(audience clapping)

We just have a small gift to say thank you so much. And we have one for your friend. So, thank you.

Okay, well thank you guys. Thank you, everybody.

(upbeat exciting music)

VEX Robotics Educators Conference.