Metro Students Shine at Vex Robotics World Championship

by Victoria Stephens for South Metro Standard

While Oklahoma may not be the first place to come to mind when considering robotics education, some Oklahoma students are working to change that perception. A local high school robotics team, Flashbang Robotics, competed in the Vex Robotics World Championship in Dallas, Texas, and placed 49th overall. 

Over 50 countries were represented in the Vex Robotics World Championship and over 1,500 teams competed. The 2023-2024 competition was called Over Under, and the game’s objective was to use the team’s robot to push tetrahedron foam balls into a goal. The robots also had to be able to go over and under barriers on the field. 

Jaxon Anderson was in the seventh grade at Brink Junior High when he became interested in robotics. He tried to join the school’s STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) robotics program in junior high, but did not make the cut until his 8th grade year. He became enthralled in it, only to discover that the high school did not have a continuance of the robotics program he loved in junior high. 

I always had that passion deep down for STEM education and robotics. The Moore Public Schools robotics programs planted the seed of passion for me.

- Jaxon Anderson, Team Captain 

Jaxon’s dad, Jason, inspired him to think big and put together his own team, with the stipulation that he create a plan including a budget before recruiting other high school robotics enthusiasts. The pair set up a garage lab for their team to use for assembly and practice. 

“I told him to run it like a business… put together an operating budget, try to figure out how much it’s going to cost, how many tournaments are we going to go to, and put it all together, and then we’ll have something to talk to the parents about, so he did it,” Jason Anderson, Flashbang Robotics mentor said. 

Vex Robotics is a STEM education organization that creates tools for robotics and hosts competitions to provide hands-on experience. There are Vex Robotics teams in over 60 countries and 22,000 schools, with over 1 million students participating. 

Each state gets a specific number of bids for Worlds, based on population, and each team must compete on a local level to secure one of those spots. The Flashbang Robotics team won 17 awards at the Vex Robotics competition.

Flashbang started out using a program called Scratch, a block-based visual programming language in which the user can drag and drop components to form computer programming scripts. Since mastering Scratch, the team has graduated to using C++, a programming industry standard. They also work with CAD (computer-aided design). Despite all the awards and valuable experience to boost their college resumes, Jaxon and his dad said that it’s about more than that. They have learned how to work together on a team and developed a rapport, and they are part of a larger robotics community. 

“What I’m probably the most proud of Jaxon for with this whole thing is not the trophies and not the awards and stuff like that, but it’s actually Jaxon’s ability to inspire other people,” Jason Anderson said. “Since we created Flashbang, there’s been two or three other teams in this metro area that said, ‘you know what if Jaxon can do it, we can do it too.’” 

Flashbang Robotics is gearing up for their next Vex Robotics World Championship called High Stakes. The object of the competition is to place rings on stakes by climbing. They are also looking to gain sponsorship opportunities to grow their program. 

Follow their journey at Flashbang Robotics on YouTube.