The VEX Passport: Robotics as a Bridge Between Classrooms and Cultures
Robotics is more than STEM. It’s a shared language that can connect classrooms across neighborhoods, states, and continents. In this keynote, from the 2026 VEX Robotics Educators Conference, Jason McKenna, VP of Global Educational Strategy, introduces the idea of the VEX Passport: a simple way to “travel” through collaboration with other VEX classrooms, so learning is not just about engineering and code, but also about stories, traditions, and perspectives. Watch this video to see how when we treat VEX as a medium for connection, we can build better problem-solvers and better citizens.
VEX Robotics Educators Conference. I want to sincerely thank all of you for coming to our conference. Those of you that have come back, I want to say thank you. Those of you that are here for the first time, I want to say welcome and thank you so much for coming. There's a lot of education conferences that you can go to. I think the thing that really sets this conference apart from many of the others is you will learn the same way that your students learn by doing, hands on, right? That's the big part of the workshops that we have here. So if you're doing a VEX IQ workshop, if you're doing a VEX AIM workshop, a VEX 123 workshop, or this year, a workshop with VEX AIR, you are going to learn by doing. And our goal with this conference is that you walk out of here getting the information that you were looking for and the information that you want to take back to your classroom with you. So no matter what that is, please make sure that you get that. If you have a one-on-one schedule with a member of our staff, fantastic. Or if you want to come and talk to us at any time in the Educators' Lounge, please do not leave here on Wednesday without getting the information that you want or the information that you need.
Now, I'm going to talk to you today about this idea that I've been kind of mauling around in my head for the last year, about this idea of the VEX passport. But before I get into the VEX passport, we'll get into the Jason McKenna passport, okay? So these pins represent places I've been all over the United States and all over the world talking about STEM education for the last 10 years that I've been working for VEX Robotics. Now, I've been to classrooms in the world that I've seen tens of thousands of dollars spent on computers, robots, equipment, storage, and they just look absolutely gorgeous. I've been to other classrooms where I've seen teachers do a miracle with scotch tape and cardboard. And I've seen pretty much everything in between. I've been so inspired by many of the educators that I've seen. Mr. Sun in Vietnam, who I had an opportunity to meet three years ago, he takes a VEX 123 robot and an offline version of VEX code VR on a computer and goes to some of the most remote schools in the world in Vietnam to teach those teachers STEM education and coding. They're absolutely amazing. My friend William, who is trying to start the first STEM afterschool center in the country of Lebanon.
You've been following the news. You obviously know there's a lot of things going on in that country, but he is still not deterred and he's still convinced that he's going to begin that STEM education center in the country of Lebanon. When I go to Australia, Marie Thiem is one of my favorite educators all over the world. She's been teaching VEX for a number of years now and every day she talks about VEX or she teaches VEX. It's like the very first day that she had an opportunity to do that. So I've been lucky enough, again, to travel the world and see and experience these educators, but also obviously see classrooms. As I mentioned at the beginning, many of these classrooms are different, whether it's a different layout, different amounts of money have been spent on it, different teaching strategies in the classroom, but I often see a lot of similarities in those classrooms. I see students collaborating with VEX robots. I see students trying to solve open-ended problems. I see students asking questions. I see students engaged. No matter where I'm at in the world, I see students that absolutely hate being bored and they want to be challenged. And I see those things and I see robotics as an organizer of those things.
This is why I, when I was still teaching the classroom, this is why I fell in love with teaching robotics. It was an opportunity for my students to collaborate. It was an opportunity for my students to solve unstructured problems. All things that I had struggled for years to do in the classroom, when I introduced robotics in the classroom, it became much easier for me to do those things. That's why I fell in love, not because I'm an engineer or I'm a tinkerer or I'm a coder, I'm none of those things, I'm a teacher. And I fell in love with it because robotics was such a great organizer for these things and it's such a great organizer for STEM education. But as I've been traveling all over the world and I've been seeing these teachers and seeing these classrooms, I started to think to myself, am I still thinking too small about what robotics can do in education? Am I still limiting myself and thinking about what robotics can actually accomplish in education? So in thinking about that, this article was published by the New York Times a year ago. So I've been thinking about this as I've been thinking about robotics. So I'm gonna show my age here. But when I just got started teaching here in the US in 1997, there was this thing called Goals 2000.
Who remembers Goals 2000? Oh, a couple of heads, there they are, yeah. Goals 2000, that was the Clinton administration, right? Clinton administration came out with Goals 2000. These were all the things that we had to learn, prepare our students for the year 2000, right? Then after Goals 2000 was what? I heard someone whisper, no child left behind, that's right, Bush administration. No child left behind. To this day, I hear the three words, adequate yearly progress, I get the shivers, right? Yeah, if you're around for no child left behind, you know exactly what I'm talking about with that, right? AYP, adequate yearly progress, okay? So we went from Goals, for me, in my educational career, we went from Goals 2000, no child left behind. Then we had Race to the Top. Who remembers Race to the Top? Yeah, who remembers Race to the Top? A few of us do. And then we had things that obviously that Common Core, Next Generation Science entered. So year after year, right? Decade after decade, we had all these educational mandates. And what this article talked about, and I love this graphic, the pencil with the white flag on it, is right now, there's no educational mandate. There's nothing. There's no Goals 2030, right?
There's no Race to the Top. There's no adequate yearly progress, no child left behind. There is no educational mandate right now. Now, some people think that that's a step backwards, okay? I actually think differently. I think it's an opportunity, okay? I think it's an opportunity because now this gives us the chance to ask ourself the question, since there is no educational mandate coming from the top, what do we want our educational mandate to be? What do we wanna accomplish with our students? What do we wanna do with our students, okay? So this article came out a year ago, and right around that exact same time, I read this book, okay? This book, the author is Benjamin Labout. I don't know if you can see it's at the bottom. The book is called When We Cease to Understand the World. Now, I see a lot of you taking pictures. Let me warn you, this is a very strange book, okay? This is one of the strangest books. This is one of the strangest books I've ever read. The reason why it's strange is because it's neither fiction nor nonfiction, it's both. Okay? What the author does is he chronicles five different scientists and mathematicians whose discoveries and their work all changed the world.
And he talks about how they teetered this line throughout their lives between genius and madness, okay? And what he was trying to show is they were gonna be able to understand that phenomenon. We can't just use logic. We can't just use regular information, okay? Now, someone that's been teaching their entire life, this really resonated with me. And it really made me think. And what this book did, it doesn't explicitly come out and say it, but what the book talks about is what happens when we live in a world in which human intelligence outpaces human wisdom.
Because that's what happened with the people that he chronicles in the book. What happens when we live in a world when human intelligence outpaces human wisdom.
Now, when I thought about that, I began to think about our classrooms. I began to think about our students. Because in the age of AI, that's the age at which our students live in right now. And what does that mean for us as teachers and educators when our students live in a world where intelligence is outpacing wisdom? As a result of things like AI. And what it really means to me is we have to start asking ourselves different questions. Whereas, is the education and teaching just about the delivery and consumption of information, or do things like judgment become so much more valuable?
Is it more valuable now because information and answers are essentially cheap is it more valuable that our students are able to entertain a number of different perspectives in their heads?
So very strange book, but these were the things that I was thinking about as I was going through the book. And then one of the mathematicians, Grothendieck had this quote, not in the book, but I was researching the book and I came with this and I found this quote of his where in which he says, discovery is the privilege of the child. The child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else.
That quote really impacted me. And it made me think of another truth that we sometimes forget, which is that wisdom cannot foster in an environment of fear.
Wisdom cannot foster in an environment of fear. So if we're our students are in an age in which intelligence can outpace wisdom, and thus we have to think about things like judgment and understanding different perspectives, understanding different people, all of which are hallmarks of wisdom. How do we then think about that? How it combines with our students, right?
Because if you think about this, okay, if we really think about this and we take a step back, what we're really talking about here is empathy, right? Now, when I say empathy, I'm not talking about a lot of the, you know, sentimental garbage that you see out there, but empathy is not produced by a slogan, okay? Empathy is produced by students sharing together. Students coming together and being, and disagreeing with one another, but not being disagreeable, okay? Students going on a learning journey together. So as a result of that, that connection that you're able to do is really a byproduct of that empathy and that wisdom. And what we're really trying to say here is these are all of the things that become so important as we expand our definition of learning, okay? So my takeaway in thinking about the lack of an educational mandate now, and also thinking about the fact that our students now live in a world in which intelligence outpaces wisdom, I think we really have to expand our definition of learning to this. A truly educated mind is distinguished less by the answer it stores than by the perspectives it can entertain, okay?
So these are all the things that I was thinking about. So now, how can we get students to understand different perspectives? How do we get our students to understand that brilliance can be shown in many different faces? Faces much different from their own, okay? Now, that might seem like a very lofty goal. That might seem like rhetoric, okay? But it happens right now. Happens right here, okay? That's what you see, and that's what you're gonna, this is why we do things like the Pit Walkin' Tour. This is why we have the VEX Educators Conference at VEX Worlds and this backdrop. This is why we're gonna take you to go watch the finals today. Because the amazing thing about VEX Worlds is when these students come and they see students from a different culture that speak a different language, that grew up in a different tradition, they don't see them as strangers, they see them as collaborators immediately, okay? They already can understand different perspectives as a result of being here, all right? This is much more than just a competition. To me, this is the future of education, all right? This really is what education needs to become again in a world in which intelligence can outpace wisdom.
So this is why we have it here, and this is what all of you are gonna have the opportunity to see and explore as we go through this. Now, again, I've had the opportunity to travel over the world and kind of see this firsthand, and Tom, our amazing editor, was kind of the put this video together to kind of show all of this to you, so. So, back in September, I wrote a small card. We asked, what is your wish for this year? And I wrote 28666, Chongqing World Championships. And then it really came true. And now I'm gonna take a picture frame and put it up there.
Young Engineers Uganda has set off a team of students to represent the country at the VEX World Robots Championship. The students under the Young Engineers Network of schools express excitement and how the program helped them to tackle challenging subjects. The problem of mathematics, but since my parents have decided to bring me here for the VEX program, I have now learnt mathematics. The biggest problem is the programming, so I like editing, but I also like the difficulty and challenges. After one course, everyone got experience right away and did things without thinking. I wanted to join the competition because I love coding and building. So I thought this would be the perfect opportunity for me to make friends and code and build more. As the first VEX U team in our country, we faced a unique challenge. There was no existing VEX community or local expertise to learn from. To fix this, we decided to bring VEX to our country, Libya. The first thing we had to do was to spread the VEX knowledge we gained. So we organised the Girl Powered Camp. It's good to see the girls get that opportunity and the Stamuil Girl Power session yesterday afternoon. I just saw the girls' eyes light up and see what they can actually lead to and what they can do.
One of the incredible things that has happened to us, being in Robotica, is visiting one of the Google offices. It's really incredible, the truth is that we've learnt a lot of things from there and I'm really grateful. We are Dreamers, we're from Medellín, we come from the first community. We're a group of women who are fulfilling their dreams. We're introducing them to the topic of Mechatronics Engineering. We've invented them for other girls who are at home or in their schools, who are involved in this, which is Robotica, which leaves them with something really nice and a lot of knowledge. Our goal was clear, to learn, grow and make a positive impact on our community. Girls are less active in robotics compared to boys, so we aimed to nurture their passion for STEM early. We also held a three-day workshop for individuals with special needs, teaching robotics basics. These efforts reflect our belief that nothing is impossible.
Our students come from Perth, which is really isolated from the rest of Australia, and they really get to connect with other teams and other students from across Australia who share the same passion for robotics. I get to explore new things, see what people do with their robots. You never know what you're going to do in the future, so it's a huge experience. It's more about what you learn from building a robot than actually winning. I feel like robotics has opened up so many doors for me as a person. It has allowed me to improve in my teamwork skills. It has allowed me chances to meet so many amazing people. It's something where we can all, from all around the world, just come together and play and have fun. You just really empower each other, as well as being like, oh, no matter what the outcome, we're all going to support each other in the end. Between this and everything that we were doing, we were still keeping a friendly companionship between them. Because even though this is a competition, we didn't come here to be hostile. We came here to be friends, to make new friends from all around the world. It's an honour to be representing our country for the first time in the World Championship.
Our country deserves a lot more representation throughout the world, and this is a great first step. I flew 13 hours from China to Wuhan to come to Dallas. I saw so many different races and different skin colour companions. They were all working hard on VEX robots. We've been working hard on the economy. I think it's a dream come true.
Bob and Tony have built the blueprint for this. It's everything I just got done talking about. The only challenge that we have now is to make it ordinary. Right now, it's not ordinary. Right now, it happens. This great event happens, of course, for us over the course of two weeks, if you're here for IQ, if you're here for V5 for a few days. But what if we could take this idea behind VEX Worlds, where students view one another not as strangers, but instead as collaborators, what if we could do that and we can bring that into our classrooms? And we can take this from something that's an event to actually make it every single day in our classroom. That is the idea behind the VEX Passport. So this is a way to extend this tremendous model to all classrooms built on the global network of certified educators. OK, we have educators certified, I believe it's over 60 countries. You'll actually see it here in a moment from all over the world. We have tens of thousands of educators certified from all over the world. So what if we used our global platform around certification as a way for these classrooms to connect all over the world? OK, so for the last few weeks, our vaunted web team have been putting this together.
So this is going to be the first live demo. So fingers crossed, everyone. So all of you are members of VEX Professional Development Plus. That's why you're here, right? So all of you have access. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go to pd.vex.com. We do have a new URL passport.vex.com that you can check out also, but that's just going to take you to where I'm going to show you in a second. So this is obviously pd.vex.com that you're all familiar with. You can see here I'm already signed in. So I'm going to do now is I'm going to go to navigation and I'm going to go to my dashboard. This is don't forget where your certificate will show up on Wednesday. OK.
There's my dashboard. So now in your dashboard, we have this, OK, which is your passport. Where you can see that you can finally connect with certified educators all over the world. So now I'm just going to select passport.
OK, so now this pop up is going to come up. So now this gives me an opportunity to edit my profile. Now, what you see down here, the map down here, this is telling you how many certified educators that we have in different parts of the country. OK, different parts of the world. I see South America here, Latin America, the United States, obviously Canada, Asia. But right now, none of your pro like there's not an opportunity for you to connect with anyone because none of your profiles on there are public. OK, this pop up comes up, as you can see here, update the details for the VEX passport. The permissions below control whether your profile image, name, school, about me, PLC Connect option, all those things are shown. So say school. I'm just going to say VEX education.
About me. I love STEM. OK. Location, there's my location. OK, and now what I'm doing is I'm going to save my VEX passport settings. Right there. OK, so now what that means is I now someone can now connect with me on the VEX passport. Now, what this is showing here again, this is all of our different certified educators that we have all over the world down here at the bottom. Educators certified by platform. So we have 6000 VEX IQ educators, over 4000 VEX code VR educators. OK, you can see here. All the VEX 123 educators we got certified. We got nine VEX educator certified. Right. Total certified, this number is a little bit low because we have to get some more of the data in there. Austin's been busy with this with this with the conference to be able to do that. But this is actually correct. You're the number of total certifications. Own the reason why there's a gap there is obviously because some people have more than one certificate and people got certified in both IQ or V5 or whatever it particularly is. But again, we have these educators, as you can see here, certified all over the globe. So what if via the VEX passport, we can take the experience of being able to connect with classrooms all over the world and brought it right here.
So what this is showing again is if I click here in Europe. It breaks it down a little bit further to me geographically. If I wanted to go here, OK, I can even go further down in there. But right now, again, none of these profiles are public. OK. Because I'm showing this to you for the very first time, obviously.
So what I'm going to do here is we do a search again. Our good friend Austin.
Made his profile public. So I'll do a search for him. And there's Austin right there, Western Beaver, Pennsylvania. You can see Austin's very humble, the man, the myth, the legend.
And you can see he's been very busy because look at all the certificates he's gotten right there. OK. But the most important thing I want to show you here now, if Austin's in a different part of the world, different part of the country, I wanted to be able to connect with him. I can then select Connect in the PLC. This will take me directly to the VEX Professional Learning. Well, it should have, but it didn't. That's OK. What this will do is this will take you directly into the PLC. We'll have a new category in our professional learning community that's just the VEX passport. And now I can send a message to him in the VEX passport. And what that gives me the opportunity to do is now have the opportunity to connect with teachers all over the world. So not right now, but if you have the opportunity, next time you log into the VEX Professional Development and you log into you go into your dashboard, this gives you the opportunity, just like you saw in the pop up for me, to update your profile, to allow your permissions to be then be shown. And now you can actually search for other people. You can connect with them in the PLC and you can connect with a classroom anywhere else in the world.
OK, so earlier when I talked about was I thinking about robotics too small, right? Even though I've been I've been working for VEX, I literally wrote a book on it. How robotics is the is this great organizer for learning? And I've been doing all that. Have I still been thinking about robotics too small? Because instead of robotics just being a medium in which students can learn STEM and they can learn engineering, they can learn all these tremendous skills. What if it was actually a medium now where we can connect classrooms all over the world, just like you see here at the VEX Robotics Championship. But now we can actually do that every single day. That is the idea behind the VEX passport. And why does this matter so much now? OK, this goes back also what I was talking about previously. AI makes answers easy to produce now more than ever. So as a result of that, when answers are plentiful, judgment becomes that much more priceless for us. And if you've been working with AI and education for the last two years, you know, this is very much true. This is what I was talking about earlier when I talk about expanding our definition of learning so that now we really emphasize things like being able to understand and entertain different perspectives, things like judgment.
These are things that we referred to previously as soft skills, but they're not soft anymore. Right. These are no longer soft skills. These are the skills that are actually the most important now. All right. These are the hardest ones that are actually going to be so difficult to replace skills like curiosity. OK. Courage, like I talked about before. And then also empathy. These are the things that we must prepare students for. This is the reality that we have to prepare students for in a world in which intelligence has the opportunity to outpace wisdom. And what is the best way to be able to do these things? What I've seen and what my travels have shown me and what I see here at the VEX Robotics World Championships, it is by connecting students of different cultures, different traditions and different areas of the world together. And again, giving them the opportunity to see them as collaborators as opposed to strangers and having them learn and work with one another and using robotics as a medium to be able to connect them together. How amazing would it be for a classroom in Pennsylvania to connect with a classroom in Brazil? Using the same robot, using VEX IQ, using the same using the same lessons from our STEM lab, giving them an opportunity to learn from one another and connect from one another.
You have the opportunity right now as being a VEX PD Plus member to do that today, tomorrow, next week, whenever you want to be able to do that, you do not just have to do that here at VEX Worlds. Okay, so connecting that all together, I feel like that's such an important opportunity now is taking this tremendous event that all of you are going to experience it and again, making it ordinary, making it something that we can do every single day in our classrooms. All right, so we've come to this point now, as I talked about at the very beginning of the presentation. Okay, again, education has always moved from mandate to mandate, from acronym to acronym, one fantabulous claim to another, something's going to revolutionize education, something's going to change education, something's going to change how students learn. Okay, and today we live in a world where none of that's been delivered to us. And as I mentioned earlier, I think that's a good thing. Sometimes history grants us adults the opportunity to actually think for ourselves. So since we're going to think for ourselves now, since no one's given us a mandate, my challenge to everyone in this room is to think boldly. Okay, let's not be timid.
We have an opportunity to think boldly now. Let's choose curiosity over compliance. Okay, let's choose collaboration over isolation. All right, let's choose wisdom over noise. Let us develop classroom where brilliance has many different faces and students have an opportunity to see that brilliance in many different faces. For too long, our classrooms have been narrow, they've been isolated and they've been afraid. This is our opportunity to change that right now. And hopefully we've given you the opportunity and the means to be able to change that through VEX Robotics, the VEX Robotics World Championship, and now the VEX Passport. Thank you very much.
And Tom, do we have a microphone in case anyone's any quiet? Oh, Nicole got the microphones. We have, I got done right on time. We have some time for questions. Anyone have any questions? Nicole and Tom will come around with microphones. If you have questions, I'll be happy to. Everyone's always scared to answer, to ask a question first. There we go, right here. My man.
So for VEX Passport, I'm actually very interested in it because I would say one of the biggest problems that I have had personally is connecting with other schools and educators that use VEX because there's a lot that there's a lot of people using in New York City, but that communication medium has always been hard. So with VEX Passport, can you PM other educators? Can you PM other schools? Yeah, that's that's unfortunately where my demo failed, but that's exactly what would happen when you hit that connect and PLC button. It will start a message for you in our professional learning community. It will go straight to that person and you can ask that person a question. Now, it's not a direct message in a sense that no one else can see it because we want other people to see the questions that you have and the answers that you'll get. We want everybody to be able to engage in that and see that. But that's exactly what it will do. And I had the same feel like when I started teaching STEM going, what? Oh, gosh, 16 years ago now, I thought I was on an island completely by myself. I had no one to talk to, no one to collaborate with, none of that. So what this does, hopefully, is it gives you the teacher an opportunity to collaborate with other teachers.
But also it gives your students an opportunity to collaborate with those other students. What we're hoping here is as a result of VEX classroom, once you start working with another classroom in the US, somewhere else in the world, you can connect via Google Meet, you can connect via Zoom. You know, we have technology allows us to do that now. So not only will you get off that island, but so will your students, hopefully. Thank you. Yeah, great question. Thank you. There's a question here in the back.
Hi, also for passport, will there be a way to filter like or tag your account so you can find people who teach the same gender, the same age range rather than just by location? Yeah, so on the right hand side here, I'll show it to you again here. Great question.
So right here, if I was just interested in VEX IQ teachers, I can select that. And there's all the VEX IQ teachers that I have. Let me get rid of Austin here.
Let me get him out of the search, but I can filter by platform right here. And that will just show me the VEX IQ teachers that I want to be able to see. But tagging and functionality, that's all things that we'll be building into it. Yes, as we get your feedback about it. Absolutely.
Right. Yep. Is there currently or maybe potential in the future on passport for industry professionals who are willing to collaborate with schools? So, for example, when professional development and evaluations are always pushing for community interaction and involvement. And so, so, for example, we're in Champaign, Illinois. We have the University of Illinois Engineering School. And a lot of times, you know, we can reach out to them. But would there potentially be like a on passport a way for.
Companies or larger educational institutions that are willing to collaborate with schools? Yeah, it's something we can definitely look into for sure. So I didn't think of to be honest with you, but that's a great feedback. That's something we can definitely look forward to, because if the whole idea is connection, you know, we'd want to make sure that there are different opportunities for connection also.
Hi, Jason. This is Manny from Los Angeles. Thanks for the presentation. Thank you. It was very inspiring to hear you talk about your travels and exposures to different classrooms. And I'm wondering if you can speak to what you see, what's the thread between educators in the classroom that are using cardboard and tape and the ones that have the fancy labs? What are they doing that you've seen that's inspiring students and leading them to success despite being a different or having different resources at hand? Yeah, it's that's a great question. It's kind of connected to the question that was asked earlier with X one, two, three. I had the opportunity to about two years ago now, I think it was. I went to Broward County, Florida, and I went into a classroom. The gentleman's name was Daniel Jones. OK, you can Google him. He's won a bunch of teaching awards and stuff like that. He was working in a school where the students didn't leave. OK, these students had had severe behavior problems, had some severe issues. They were staying at the school and he was using VEX one, two, three to teach these high school students computer science. I spent five minutes in his class. Within the first five minutes, I was in his classroom.
I knew that no matter what I did for the rest of my life, I would never be as good of a teacher as he is right now. Right. That's a very humbling feeling. Right. It's a very, very humbling feeling. And it's a very inspiring feeling at the same time. So when I think about Daniel, I think about what he was doing with those kids and I think about how he was thinking outside the box to use a product that's normally not geared for high school students, but with high school students and finding success with these students. Whereas these students, the reason why they are at that school is because they hadn't had a lot of success in their lives, was able to do that in a way and do it so effectively. Right. That's the common thread that I see in the classrooms that have a lot of money spent in it and classrooms that are held together by scotch tape and cardboard. Right. You have teachers that are willing to think outside the box. You have teachers that are not worried about whatever Ed Tech says. This is the right tool for your students. But they understand the individual needs of their students and they find the right solution for them. And then they have a way. This is the art of teaching, not the science of things, but the art of teaching.
They have a way through their art to bring out the means and the ends and the wants and the desires of their students to an effective end. Right. That is to me, that's the beauty of teaching. That's what I've been able to see all over the world. And that's why I'm so excited about things like the VEX passport, because I've got to see, but none of you have. Right. I'm lucky because Bob puts me on a plane and sends me all over the world to do these types of things. But we obviously can't send you all. So what if we created something like the VEX passport? So now you have an opportunity, as this gentleman was talking about, to connect with these educators. You have an opportunity to connect your students to them. And get those same things out of it that I've been able to get out of it. To get those same out that all the teachers and mentors here at VEX World see, right, when they see their team from California, right, collaborating with a team from Vietnam and trying to get the highest possible score that they can again, not seeing each other as strangers, but as collaborators. Right. So that's really, to me, the beauty of it. That's why we're excited about the VEX passport. That's why we're excited to get all your feedback so we can make it even better.
Thank you. So we're going to have time for one more question. And I have someone over here. And then Jason is here for the next three days. So you guys can have a chat with him in the hallways over the next course. So go ahead.
Use the mic so we can get on to the end. I'm Denise. I'm from the northern Virginia area. So when I was doing this passport, I was trying to see if there was a feature on there to like favorite somebody so that way I can connect with my beautiful friend, Aaron, and she can favorite we can each other and get connected that way. Another thing is, is I love that. Stop you're right there because you made me think of something. Yeah. So if anyone has any ideas for the VEX passport, I hear a lot of great ideas. We've got a couple of them already. OK.
Send them to me. And I'll keep my web team busy over the next three months, implementing everything. OK, so since then, all your ideas to me, you I want to connect with industry. I want to I want to be able to favor something. I want to be able to tag some of the little filter something. Please send me an email and we will we will prioritize the list and we'll start to get the work on that. But you had another part of your question. Please go ahead. Well, just another part of this was I love the industry idea. I was a science teacher forever. So when the if you've ever connected with reach a scientist, I would love to be able to connect with industry within our area. Northern Virginia has a hot pocket of engineers that I would love to be able to reach out to me like, hey, can you come teach my kids about pork ratio? So it would be really nice to have that section on there also for them. So they could reach out just like reach a scientist would be awesome. Great. Thank you. Just an engineer. Thank you very much.
So Nicole's cut me off for questions. So it is.
Nine fifty, so we have ten minutes before we begin our workshops, our small group presentation, so get some coffee, use the bathroom if you have to all the workshops right over here. If you're not sure where to go or what's next on your schedule, find one of us will be able to help. But thank you very, very much. Thank you. Thank you all. VEX Robotics Educators Conference.
Now, I'm going to talk to you today about this idea that I've been kind of mauling around in my head for the last year, about this idea of the VEX passport. But before I get into the VEX passport, we'll get into the Jason McKenna passport, okay? So these pins represent places I've been all over the United States and all over the world talking about STEM education for the last 10 years that I've been working for VEX Robotics. Now, I've been to classrooms in the world that I've seen tens of thousands of dollars spent on computers, robots, equipment, storage, and they just look absolutely gorgeous. I've been to other classrooms where I've seen teachers do a miracle with scotch tape and cardboard. And I've seen pretty much everything in between. I've been so inspired by many of the educators that I've seen. Mr. Sun in Vietnam, who I had an opportunity to meet three years ago, he takes a VEX 123 robot and an offline version of VEX code VR on a computer and goes to some of the most remote schools in the world in Vietnam to teach those teachers STEM education and coding. They're absolutely amazing. My friend William, who is trying to start the first STEM afterschool center in the country of Lebanon.
You've been following the news. You obviously know there's a lot of things going on in that country, but he is still not deterred and he's still convinced that he's going to begin that STEM education center in the country of Lebanon. When I go to Australia, Marie Thiem is one of my favorite educators all over the world. She's been teaching VEX for a number of years now and every day she talks about VEX or she teaches VEX. It's like the very first day that she had an opportunity to do that. So I've been lucky enough, again, to travel the world and see and experience these educators, but also obviously see classrooms. As I mentioned at the beginning, many of these classrooms are different, whether it's a different layout, different amounts of money have been spent on it, different teaching strategies in the classroom, but I often see a lot of similarities in those classrooms. I see students collaborating with VEX robots. I see students trying to solve open-ended problems. I see students asking questions. I see students engaged. No matter where I'm at in the world, I see students that absolutely hate being bored and they want to be challenged. And I see those things and I see robotics as an organizer of those things.
This is why I, when I was still teaching the classroom, this is why I fell in love with teaching robotics. It was an opportunity for my students to collaborate. It was an opportunity for my students to solve unstructured problems. All things that I had struggled for years to do in the classroom, when I introduced robotics in the classroom, it became much easier for me to do those things. That's why I fell in love, not because I'm an engineer or I'm a tinkerer or I'm a coder, I'm none of those things, I'm a teacher. And I fell in love with it because robotics was such a great organizer for these things and it's such a great organizer for STEM education. But as I've been traveling all over the world and I've been seeing these teachers and seeing these classrooms, I started to think to myself, am I still thinking too small about what robotics can do in education? Am I still limiting myself and thinking about what robotics can actually accomplish in education? So in thinking about that, this article was published by the New York Times a year ago. So I've been thinking about this as I've been thinking about robotics. So I'm gonna show my age here. But when I just got started teaching here in the US in 1997, there was this thing called Goals 2000.
Who remembers Goals 2000? Oh, a couple of heads, there they are, yeah. Goals 2000, that was the Clinton administration, right? Clinton administration came out with Goals 2000. These were all the things that we had to learn, prepare our students for the year 2000, right? Then after Goals 2000 was what? I heard someone whisper, no child left behind, that's right, Bush administration. No child left behind. To this day, I hear the three words, adequate yearly progress, I get the shivers, right? Yeah, if you're around for no child left behind, you know exactly what I'm talking about with that, right? AYP, adequate yearly progress, okay? So we went from Goals, for me, in my educational career, we went from Goals 2000, no child left behind. Then we had Race to the Top. Who remembers Race to the Top? Yeah, who remembers Race to the Top? A few of us do. And then we had things that obviously that Common Core, Next Generation Science entered. So year after year, right? Decade after decade, we had all these educational mandates. And what this article talked about, and I love this graphic, the pencil with the white flag on it, is right now, there's no educational mandate. There's nothing. There's no Goals 2030, right?
There's no Race to the Top. There's no adequate yearly progress, no child left behind. There is no educational mandate right now. Now, some people think that that's a step backwards, okay? I actually think differently. I think it's an opportunity, okay? I think it's an opportunity because now this gives us the chance to ask ourself the question, since there is no educational mandate coming from the top, what do we want our educational mandate to be? What do we wanna accomplish with our students? What do we wanna do with our students, okay? So this article came out a year ago, and right around that exact same time, I read this book, okay? This book, the author is Benjamin Labout. I don't know if you can see it's at the bottom. The book is called When We Cease to Understand the World. Now, I see a lot of you taking pictures. Let me warn you, this is a very strange book, okay? This is one of the strangest books. This is one of the strangest books I've ever read. The reason why it's strange is because it's neither fiction nor nonfiction, it's both. Okay? What the author does is he chronicles five different scientists and mathematicians whose discoveries and their work all changed the world.
And he talks about how they teetered this line throughout their lives between genius and madness, okay? And what he was trying to show is they were gonna be able to understand that phenomenon. We can't just use logic. We can't just use regular information, okay? Now, someone that's been teaching their entire life, this really resonated with me. And it really made me think. And what this book did, it doesn't explicitly come out and say it, but what the book talks about is what happens when we live in a world in which human intelligence outpaces human wisdom.
Because that's what happened with the people that he chronicles in the book. What happens when we live in a world when human intelligence outpaces human wisdom.
Now, when I thought about that, I began to think about our classrooms. I began to think about our students. Because in the age of AI, that's the age at which our students live in right now. And what does that mean for us as teachers and educators when our students live in a world where intelligence is outpacing wisdom? As a result of things like AI. And what it really means to me is we have to start asking ourselves different questions. Whereas, is the education and teaching just about the delivery and consumption of information, or do things like judgment become so much more valuable?
Is it more valuable now because information and answers are essentially cheap is it more valuable that our students are able to entertain a number of different perspectives in their heads?
So very strange book, but these were the things that I was thinking about as I was going through the book. And then one of the mathematicians, Grothendieck had this quote, not in the book, but I was researching the book and I came with this and I found this quote of his where in which he says, discovery is the privilege of the child. The child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else.
That quote really impacted me. And it made me think of another truth that we sometimes forget, which is that wisdom cannot foster in an environment of fear.
Wisdom cannot foster in an environment of fear. So if we're our students are in an age in which intelligence can outpace wisdom, and thus we have to think about things like judgment and understanding different perspectives, understanding different people, all of which are hallmarks of wisdom. How do we then think about that? How it combines with our students, right?
Because if you think about this, okay, if we really think about this and we take a step back, what we're really talking about here is empathy, right? Now, when I say empathy, I'm not talking about a lot of the, you know, sentimental garbage that you see out there, but empathy is not produced by a slogan, okay? Empathy is produced by students sharing together. Students coming together and being, and disagreeing with one another, but not being disagreeable, okay? Students going on a learning journey together. So as a result of that, that connection that you're able to do is really a byproduct of that empathy and that wisdom. And what we're really trying to say here is these are all of the things that become so important as we expand our definition of learning, okay? So my takeaway in thinking about the lack of an educational mandate now, and also thinking about the fact that our students now live in a world in which intelligence outpaces wisdom, I think we really have to expand our definition of learning to this. A truly educated mind is distinguished less by the answer it stores than by the perspectives it can entertain, okay?
So these are all the things that I was thinking about. So now, how can we get students to understand different perspectives? How do we get our students to understand that brilliance can be shown in many different faces? Faces much different from their own, okay? Now, that might seem like a very lofty goal. That might seem like rhetoric, okay? But it happens right now. Happens right here, okay? That's what you see, and that's what you're gonna, this is why we do things like the Pit Walkin' Tour. This is why we have the VEX Educators Conference at VEX Worlds and this backdrop. This is why we're gonna take you to go watch the finals today. Because the amazing thing about VEX Worlds is when these students come and they see students from a different culture that speak a different language, that grew up in a different tradition, they don't see them as strangers, they see them as collaborators immediately, okay? They already can understand different perspectives as a result of being here, all right? This is much more than just a competition. To me, this is the future of education, all right? This really is what education needs to become again in a world in which intelligence can outpace wisdom.
So this is why we have it here, and this is what all of you are gonna have the opportunity to see and explore as we go through this. Now, again, I've had the opportunity to travel over the world and kind of see this firsthand, and Tom, our amazing editor, was kind of the put this video together to kind of show all of this to you, so. So, back in September, I wrote a small card. We asked, what is your wish for this year? And I wrote 28666, Chongqing World Championships. And then it really came true. And now I'm gonna take a picture frame and put it up there.
Young Engineers Uganda has set off a team of students to represent the country at the VEX World Robots Championship. The students under the Young Engineers Network of schools express excitement and how the program helped them to tackle challenging subjects. The problem of mathematics, but since my parents have decided to bring me here for the VEX program, I have now learnt mathematics. The biggest problem is the programming, so I like editing, but I also like the difficulty and challenges. After one course, everyone got experience right away and did things without thinking. I wanted to join the competition because I love coding and building. So I thought this would be the perfect opportunity for me to make friends and code and build more. As the first VEX U team in our country, we faced a unique challenge. There was no existing VEX community or local expertise to learn from. To fix this, we decided to bring VEX to our country, Libya. The first thing we had to do was to spread the VEX knowledge we gained. So we organised the Girl Powered Camp. It's good to see the girls get that opportunity and the Stamuil Girl Power session yesterday afternoon. I just saw the girls' eyes light up and see what they can actually lead to and what they can do.
One of the incredible things that has happened to us, being in Robotica, is visiting one of the Google offices. It's really incredible, the truth is that we've learnt a lot of things from there and I'm really grateful. We are Dreamers, we're from Medellín, we come from the first community. We're a group of women who are fulfilling their dreams. We're introducing them to the topic of Mechatronics Engineering. We've invented them for other girls who are at home or in their schools, who are involved in this, which is Robotica, which leaves them with something really nice and a lot of knowledge. Our goal was clear, to learn, grow and make a positive impact on our community. Girls are less active in robotics compared to boys, so we aimed to nurture their passion for STEM early. We also held a three-day workshop for individuals with special needs, teaching robotics basics. These efforts reflect our belief that nothing is impossible.
Our students come from Perth, which is really isolated from the rest of Australia, and they really get to connect with other teams and other students from across Australia who share the same passion for robotics. I get to explore new things, see what people do with their robots. You never know what you're going to do in the future, so it's a huge experience. It's more about what you learn from building a robot than actually winning. I feel like robotics has opened up so many doors for me as a person. It has allowed me to improve in my teamwork skills. It has allowed me chances to meet so many amazing people. It's something where we can all, from all around the world, just come together and play and have fun. You just really empower each other, as well as being like, oh, no matter what the outcome, we're all going to support each other in the end. Between this and everything that we were doing, we were still keeping a friendly companionship between them. Because even though this is a competition, we didn't come here to be hostile. We came here to be friends, to make new friends from all around the world. It's an honour to be representing our country for the first time in the World Championship.
Our country deserves a lot more representation throughout the world, and this is a great first step. I flew 13 hours from China to Wuhan to come to Dallas. I saw so many different races and different skin colour companions. They were all working hard on VEX robots. We've been working hard on the economy. I think it's a dream come true.
Bob and Tony have built the blueprint for this. It's everything I just got done talking about. The only challenge that we have now is to make it ordinary. Right now, it's not ordinary. Right now, it happens. This great event happens, of course, for us over the course of two weeks, if you're here for IQ, if you're here for V5 for a few days. But what if we could take this idea behind VEX Worlds, where students view one another not as strangers, but instead as collaborators, what if we could do that and we can bring that into our classrooms? And we can take this from something that's an event to actually make it every single day in our classroom. That is the idea behind the VEX Passport. So this is a way to extend this tremendous model to all classrooms built on the global network of certified educators. OK, we have educators certified, I believe it's over 60 countries. You'll actually see it here in a moment from all over the world. We have tens of thousands of educators certified from all over the world. So what if we used our global platform around certification as a way for these classrooms to connect all over the world? OK, so for the last few weeks, our vaunted web team have been putting this together.
So this is going to be the first live demo. So fingers crossed, everyone. So all of you are members of VEX Professional Development Plus. That's why you're here, right? So all of you have access. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go to pd.vex.com. We do have a new URL passport.vex.com that you can check out also, but that's just going to take you to where I'm going to show you in a second. So this is obviously pd.vex.com that you're all familiar with. You can see here I'm already signed in. So I'm going to do now is I'm going to go to navigation and I'm going to go to my dashboard. This is don't forget where your certificate will show up on Wednesday. OK.
There's my dashboard. So now in your dashboard, we have this, OK, which is your passport. Where you can see that you can finally connect with certified educators all over the world. So now I'm just going to select passport.
OK, so now this pop up is going to come up. So now this gives me an opportunity to edit my profile. Now, what you see down here, the map down here, this is telling you how many certified educators that we have in different parts of the country. OK, different parts of the world. I see South America here, Latin America, the United States, obviously Canada, Asia. But right now, none of your pro like there's not an opportunity for you to connect with anyone because none of your profiles on there are public. OK, this pop up comes up, as you can see here, update the details for the VEX passport. The permissions below control whether your profile image, name, school, about me, PLC Connect option, all those things are shown. So say school. I'm just going to say VEX education.
About me. I love STEM. OK. Location, there's my location. OK, and now what I'm doing is I'm going to save my VEX passport settings. Right there. OK, so now what that means is I now someone can now connect with me on the VEX passport. Now, what this is showing here again, this is all of our different certified educators that we have all over the world down here at the bottom. Educators certified by platform. So we have 6000 VEX IQ educators, over 4000 VEX code VR educators. OK, you can see here. All the VEX 123 educators we got certified. We got nine VEX educator certified. Right. Total certified, this number is a little bit low because we have to get some more of the data in there. Austin's been busy with this with this with the conference to be able to do that. But this is actually correct. You're the number of total certifications. Own the reason why there's a gap there is obviously because some people have more than one certificate and people got certified in both IQ or V5 or whatever it particularly is. But again, we have these educators, as you can see here, certified all over the globe. So what if via the VEX passport, we can take the experience of being able to connect with classrooms all over the world and brought it right here.
So what this is showing again is if I click here in Europe. It breaks it down a little bit further to me geographically. If I wanted to go here, OK, I can even go further down in there. But right now, again, none of these profiles are public. OK. Because I'm showing this to you for the very first time, obviously.
So what I'm going to do here is we do a search again. Our good friend Austin.
Made his profile public. So I'll do a search for him. And there's Austin right there, Western Beaver, Pennsylvania. You can see Austin's very humble, the man, the myth, the legend.
And you can see he's been very busy because look at all the certificates he's gotten right there. OK. But the most important thing I want to show you here now, if Austin's in a different part of the world, different part of the country, I wanted to be able to connect with him. I can then select Connect in the PLC. This will take me directly to the VEX Professional Learning. Well, it should have, but it didn't. That's OK. What this will do is this will take you directly into the PLC. We'll have a new category in our professional learning community that's just the VEX passport. And now I can send a message to him in the VEX passport. And what that gives me the opportunity to do is now have the opportunity to connect with teachers all over the world. So not right now, but if you have the opportunity, next time you log into the VEX Professional Development and you log into you go into your dashboard, this gives you the opportunity, just like you saw in the pop up for me, to update your profile, to allow your permissions to be then be shown. And now you can actually search for other people. You can connect with them in the PLC and you can connect with a classroom anywhere else in the world.
OK, so earlier when I talked about was I thinking about robotics too small, right? Even though I've been I've been working for VEX, I literally wrote a book on it. How robotics is the is this great organizer for learning? And I've been doing all that. Have I still been thinking about robotics too small? Because instead of robotics just being a medium in which students can learn STEM and they can learn engineering, they can learn all these tremendous skills. What if it was actually a medium now where we can connect classrooms all over the world, just like you see here at the VEX Robotics Championship. But now we can actually do that every single day. That is the idea behind the VEX passport. And why does this matter so much now? OK, this goes back also what I was talking about previously. AI makes answers easy to produce now more than ever. So as a result of that, when answers are plentiful, judgment becomes that much more priceless for us. And if you've been working with AI and education for the last two years, you know, this is very much true. This is what I was talking about earlier when I talk about expanding our definition of learning so that now we really emphasize things like being able to understand and entertain different perspectives, things like judgment.
These are things that we referred to previously as soft skills, but they're not soft anymore. Right. These are no longer soft skills. These are the skills that are actually the most important now. All right. These are the hardest ones that are actually going to be so difficult to replace skills like curiosity. OK. Courage, like I talked about before. And then also empathy. These are the things that we must prepare students for. This is the reality that we have to prepare students for in a world in which intelligence has the opportunity to outpace wisdom. And what is the best way to be able to do these things? What I've seen and what my travels have shown me and what I see here at the VEX Robotics World Championships, it is by connecting students of different cultures, different traditions and different areas of the world together. And again, giving them the opportunity to see them as collaborators as opposed to strangers and having them learn and work with one another and using robotics as a medium to be able to connect them together. How amazing would it be for a classroom in Pennsylvania to connect with a classroom in Brazil? Using the same robot, using VEX IQ, using the same using the same lessons from our STEM lab, giving them an opportunity to learn from one another and connect from one another.
You have the opportunity right now as being a VEX PD Plus member to do that today, tomorrow, next week, whenever you want to be able to do that, you do not just have to do that here at VEX Worlds. Okay, so connecting that all together, I feel like that's such an important opportunity now is taking this tremendous event that all of you are going to experience it and again, making it ordinary, making it something that we can do every single day in our classrooms. All right, so we've come to this point now, as I talked about at the very beginning of the presentation. Okay, again, education has always moved from mandate to mandate, from acronym to acronym, one fantabulous claim to another, something's going to revolutionize education, something's going to change education, something's going to change how students learn. Okay, and today we live in a world where none of that's been delivered to us. And as I mentioned earlier, I think that's a good thing. Sometimes history grants us adults the opportunity to actually think for ourselves. So since we're going to think for ourselves now, since no one's given us a mandate, my challenge to everyone in this room is to think boldly. Okay, let's not be timid.
We have an opportunity to think boldly now. Let's choose curiosity over compliance. Okay, let's choose collaboration over isolation. All right, let's choose wisdom over noise. Let us develop classroom where brilliance has many different faces and students have an opportunity to see that brilliance in many different faces. For too long, our classrooms have been narrow, they've been isolated and they've been afraid. This is our opportunity to change that right now. And hopefully we've given you the opportunity and the means to be able to change that through VEX Robotics, the VEX Robotics World Championship, and now the VEX Passport. Thank you very much.
And Tom, do we have a microphone in case anyone's any quiet? Oh, Nicole got the microphones. We have, I got done right on time. We have some time for questions. Anyone have any questions? Nicole and Tom will come around with microphones. If you have questions, I'll be happy to. Everyone's always scared to answer, to ask a question first. There we go, right here. My man.
So for VEX Passport, I'm actually very interested in it because I would say one of the biggest problems that I have had personally is connecting with other schools and educators that use VEX because there's a lot that there's a lot of people using in New York City, but that communication medium has always been hard. So with VEX Passport, can you PM other educators? Can you PM other schools? Yeah, that's that's unfortunately where my demo failed, but that's exactly what would happen when you hit that connect and PLC button. It will start a message for you in our professional learning community. It will go straight to that person and you can ask that person a question. Now, it's not a direct message in a sense that no one else can see it because we want other people to see the questions that you have and the answers that you'll get. We want everybody to be able to engage in that and see that. But that's exactly what it will do. And I had the same feel like when I started teaching STEM going, what? Oh, gosh, 16 years ago now, I thought I was on an island completely by myself. I had no one to talk to, no one to collaborate with, none of that. So what this does, hopefully, is it gives you the teacher an opportunity to collaborate with other teachers.
But also it gives your students an opportunity to collaborate with those other students. What we're hoping here is as a result of VEX classroom, once you start working with another classroom in the US, somewhere else in the world, you can connect via Google Meet, you can connect via Zoom. You know, we have technology allows us to do that now. So not only will you get off that island, but so will your students, hopefully. Thank you. Yeah, great question. Thank you. There's a question here in the back.
Hi, also for passport, will there be a way to filter like or tag your account so you can find people who teach the same gender, the same age range rather than just by location? Yeah, so on the right hand side here, I'll show it to you again here. Great question.
So right here, if I was just interested in VEX IQ teachers, I can select that. And there's all the VEX IQ teachers that I have. Let me get rid of Austin here.
Let me get him out of the search, but I can filter by platform right here. And that will just show me the VEX IQ teachers that I want to be able to see. But tagging and functionality, that's all things that we'll be building into it. Yes, as we get your feedback about it. Absolutely.
Right. Yep. Is there currently or maybe potential in the future on passport for industry professionals who are willing to collaborate with schools? So, for example, when professional development and evaluations are always pushing for community interaction and involvement. And so, so, for example, we're in Champaign, Illinois. We have the University of Illinois Engineering School. And a lot of times, you know, we can reach out to them. But would there potentially be like a on passport a way for.
Companies or larger educational institutions that are willing to collaborate with schools? Yeah, it's something we can definitely look into for sure. So I didn't think of to be honest with you, but that's a great feedback. That's something we can definitely look forward to, because if the whole idea is connection, you know, we'd want to make sure that there are different opportunities for connection also.
Hi, Jason. This is Manny from Los Angeles. Thanks for the presentation. Thank you. It was very inspiring to hear you talk about your travels and exposures to different classrooms. And I'm wondering if you can speak to what you see, what's the thread between educators in the classroom that are using cardboard and tape and the ones that have the fancy labs? What are they doing that you've seen that's inspiring students and leading them to success despite being a different or having different resources at hand? Yeah, it's that's a great question. It's kind of connected to the question that was asked earlier with X one, two, three. I had the opportunity to about two years ago now, I think it was. I went to Broward County, Florida, and I went into a classroom. The gentleman's name was Daniel Jones. OK, you can Google him. He's won a bunch of teaching awards and stuff like that. He was working in a school where the students didn't leave. OK, these students had had severe behavior problems, had some severe issues. They were staying at the school and he was using VEX one, two, three to teach these high school students computer science. I spent five minutes in his class. Within the first five minutes, I was in his classroom.
I knew that no matter what I did for the rest of my life, I would never be as good of a teacher as he is right now. Right. That's a very humbling feeling. Right. It's a very, very humbling feeling. And it's a very inspiring feeling at the same time. So when I think about Daniel, I think about what he was doing with those kids and I think about how he was thinking outside the box to use a product that's normally not geared for high school students, but with high school students and finding success with these students. Whereas these students, the reason why they are at that school is because they hadn't had a lot of success in their lives, was able to do that in a way and do it so effectively. Right. That's the common thread that I see in the classrooms that have a lot of money spent in it and classrooms that are held together by scotch tape and cardboard. Right. You have teachers that are willing to think outside the box. You have teachers that are not worried about whatever Ed Tech says. This is the right tool for your students. But they understand the individual needs of their students and they find the right solution for them. And then they have a way. This is the art of teaching, not the science of things, but the art of teaching.
They have a way through their art to bring out the means and the ends and the wants and the desires of their students to an effective end. Right. That is to me, that's the beauty of teaching. That's what I've been able to see all over the world. And that's why I'm so excited about things like the VEX passport, because I've got to see, but none of you have. Right. I'm lucky because Bob puts me on a plane and sends me all over the world to do these types of things. But we obviously can't send you all. So what if we created something like the VEX passport? So now you have an opportunity, as this gentleman was talking about, to connect with these educators. You have an opportunity to connect your students to them. And get those same things out of it that I've been able to get out of it. To get those same out that all the teachers and mentors here at VEX World see, right, when they see their team from California, right, collaborating with a team from Vietnam and trying to get the highest possible score that they can again, not seeing each other as strangers, but as collaborators. Right. So that's really, to me, the beauty of it. That's why we're excited about the VEX passport. That's why we're excited to get all your feedback so we can make it even better.
Thank you. So we're going to have time for one more question. And I have someone over here. And then Jason is here for the next three days. So you guys can have a chat with him in the hallways over the next course. So go ahead.
Use the mic so we can get on to the end. I'm Denise. I'm from the northern Virginia area. So when I was doing this passport, I was trying to see if there was a feature on there to like favorite somebody so that way I can connect with my beautiful friend, Aaron, and she can favorite we can each other and get connected that way. Another thing is, is I love that. Stop you're right there because you made me think of something. Yeah. So if anyone has any ideas for the VEX passport, I hear a lot of great ideas. We've got a couple of them already. OK.
Send them to me. And I'll keep my web team busy over the next three months, implementing everything. OK, so since then, all your ideas to me, you I want to connect with industry. I want to I want to be able to favor something. I want to be able to tag some of the little filter something. Please send me an email and we will we will prioritize the list and we'll start to get the work on that. But you had another part of your question. Please go ahead. Well, just another part of this was I love the industry idea. I was a science teacher forever. So when the if you've ever connected with reach a scientist, I would love to be able to connect with industry within our area. Northern Virginia has a hot pocket of engineers that I would love to be able to reach out to me like, hey, can you come teach my kids about pork ratio? So it would be really nice to have that section on there also for them. So they could reach out just like reach a scientist would be awesome. Great. Thank you. Just an engineer. Thank you very much.
So Nicole's cut me off for questions. So it is.
Nine fifty, so we have ten minutes before we begin our workshops, our small group presentation, so get some coffee, use the bathroom if you have to all the workshops right over here. If you're not sure where to go or what's next on your schedule, find one of us will be able to help. But thank you very, very much. Thank you. Thank you all. VEX Robotics Educators Conference.
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