More than 150 K-12 teams are vying this week for a chance to compete at the 2025 VEX Robotics World Championship from May 9-14 in Dallas.
The 2025 VEX Robotics State Championship is taking place through Saturday at Tucker Coliseum at Arkansas Technical University in Russellville.
The purpose of the event is to get students interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and to engage them in “hands-on, affordable and sustainable robotics engineering programs,” according to a news release from the university.
The ATU robotics team and its advisor, Jecob Weidenfeller, will lead the hosting of the annual event, in collaboration with Sarah Jones of the Robotics Education and Competition (REC) Foundation. Volunteer judges were provided by Entergy Arkansas.
The top 28 teams will go on to compete at the world championship, which is sponsored by Google, the U.S. Air Force, Tesla, NASA, the Northrop Grumman Foundation, Texas Instruments, the U.S. Navy, Dell Technologies and more.
The first VEX Robotics competition took place in 2007, and ATU has hosted 12 of the last 13 state championships, with the lone exception being 2021. The event was not held that year because of the covid 19 pandemic, according to ATU spokesperson Sam Strasner.
A recent study claims Arkansas has a critical lack of STEM graduates. The study also found that doubling the number of engineering graduates and increasing research productivity could add $3.9 billion to the state’s economy by 2038, and will also bring an estimated 19,000 jobs to Arkansas.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates a 10.4% increase in STEM occupations over 10 years, while non-STEM occupations are only estimated to see a 3.6 percent increase over 10 years (based on data collected in 2023).
Information for this article was contributed by Lucas Dufalla of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Lucas Dufalla is a Report for America Corps member.
