Vex Robotics is an international corporation striving to help school kids learn teamwork and robotics by building a robot from near nothing and compete with it in games held by Vex that are different every year. Our club plays in this and have done for several years, and plan to for more years to come.

At the start of this year our club went up to Auckland for the Vex national competition where two of our teams competed with our robots in a game called In The Zone; where four teams play to pick up cones and score them by stacking them and/or placing them on mobile goals placed throughout the field. We are pleased to say that we ranked the highest in the national competition throughout Burnside Robotics Club nationals history, competing against over 70 teams! Sadly we didn't make Worlds but hope to reach Worlds next year.

Another competition we did well in was the Canterbury challenge, Pyramid Scheme, made by the University of Canterbury where we had to score balls into troughs around the field walls and a pyramid in the middle. In this game we ranked number one with three of our teams playing in the competition with several other schools which we are proud to say we won.

We’ve grown a lot since last year, adding two new teams to our club and we have set the goal to enter more teams from the South Island into the national Vex Robotics competition in February next year. The new game is Turning Point (shown in image) and we are optimistic for the future of our club and look forward to building a strong STEM foundation for upcoming generations of our school.