The VEX IQ Challenge
Each year, teams can design and build a robot to play against other teams in a game-based VEX IQ Challenge. The game changes each year. Click here for this year's current game and rules. Tournaments are held year-round at the regional, state, and national levels leading to the VEX Robotics World Championship each April.
The VEX IQ Challenge is played on a 4’x8’ rectangular field. Teams program their robots to move around the field and grab, toss, and place game pieces in scoring zones in order to earn the most points.
There are two types of challenges the teams will tackle. In the Robotic Skills Challenge, teams try to score as many points as possible with their robotic build in two types of matches. Driving Skills Matches are entirely driver controlled and Programming Skills Matches are autonomous with limited student interaction. The second type of challenge is the Teamwork Challenge, in which two robots compete in the challenge as an alliance in 60 second long matches, working together to score the most points.
VEX Competitions give students the opportunity to:
- Demonstrate their driving and programming skills.
- Work together as a team to solve problems.
- Meet new people from their community, state, and even other countries.
- Have fun!
Extend Your Learning
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Let's Start a Team for this Year's Challenge!
Visit the REC Foundation website and watch the video introducing the current challenge by clicking this link.
Challenge students to work in small groups to brainstorm a list of behaviors that a team's robot would need in order to solve this year's challenge.
Students should share their ideas with the rest of the class and then combine the lists together into a master list. This student created list can be used by the teacher for planning purposes when choosing additional VEX STEM labs to complete.
After sharing their list of behaviors, students can be further prepared for competitions by asking the groups to organize the following in their engineering notebooks:
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Sketch the game field and map out routes the robot should follow in order to score points.
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Explain in plain language each behavior the robot needs to carry out (this is known as pseudocode).