Robotics News
Bryleigh-Ann LEGG & Joe WANG
Robotics Coordinators
Classroom Teacher
Highvale Secondary College is incredibly proud to celebrate the achievements of our Robotics Club following their recent international excursion to the 2026 VEX Robotics World Championship in St Louis, Missouri. The event brought together top VEX Robotics teams from around the world at the America’s Center Convention Complex. Hosting 867 teams, the enormous scale and standard of the competition gave our students a fantastic opportunity to test their months of preparation against the best in the world!
Congratulations go to our student representatives:
Team 97230D: Yi Hong C., Jaxx L., Joseph L., Akira S., and Highvale Alumni Ehen C.
Team 97230F: Aaron J., Ethan M., Hudson M. Kenneth W
Congratulations also go to their supporting members throughout the season!
Preparation
After touching down in St Louis, students got to see the local sights such as the Gateway Arch, the City Museum, and explore Downtown St Louis with its baseball stadium. Importantly a local charter school – the Gateway Science Academy – kindly donated their robotics room to us and other international teams for practice and preparation. This not only allowed students to diagnose any key issues ahead of the event but let them have a taste of American school life and meet other teams from places such as the United Kingdom and Libya!
Competition
Before a long three days of competing, our students started the competition by representing Australia in the Opening Ceremony’s Parade of Nation. Our students sported Socceroos colours to represent our country!
After this, our students took to their pits, surrounded by likeminded engineers from all over the world, and began to compete. Highvale was represented by two teams across two separate divisions, with 97230D competing in the Science Division and 97230F competing in the Technology Division. Competing in this high level of competition involved scouting other teams and partners, discussing strategies with different teams, all while preparing and practicing for upcoming matches. The event was livestreamed throughout, and our teams competed in every match with a winner’s mindset. The amount of pressure during the event was intense, but our students handled it with smiles in stride.
We are incredibly proud of both teams for the way they represented Highvale Secondary College overseas. Their efforts reflect the student-led nature of our Robotics Club and the values of resilience, responsibility, and excellence that students continue to demonstrate through robotics. Mr Wang and I continue to commend our students for their determination under pressure, their commitment to seeing the competition through, and the all-around fun they had when competing throughout.
All of our students enjoyed the closing ceremony together, where they learned about the challenge for next year and spent the rest of the trip debating what they would build next!
Post Competition
After the competition concluded, students had the opportunity to experience a range of significant sites across the United States. The group travelled from St Louis to Las Vegas, visited the Grand Canyon West Rim and Hoover Dam, and finished the trip with a city highlights tour of Los Angeles before returning to Melbourne.
For many of our students, this was not only their first international robotics competition, but their first opportunity to see what a global STEM community can look like. They returned with new ideas, new friendships, and a much clearer sense of what is possible in robotics when students are willing to keep designing, testing, failing, rebuilding and trying again.
Special thanks!
Without the many helping hands on this trip, this experience would not have been possible for our students. I extend our sincere thanks to:
All the parents and guardians who attended and supported our students throughout the event.
Royal Gasimov for hosting us at his school, and all the friendly GSA staff and students who popped in throughout the day to make us feel so welcome in their robotics room.
St Andrews Christian College’s students and mentors for dedicating the time for our teams to practice and work together during the December holidays and overseas.
The teams from all over the world who helped us in any way, such as:
Mtronics Mgt7 from Libya for their partnership in practicing and wonderful Libyan coffee.
St Mary Redcliffe Sixth Form teams from the UK for their encouragement and bountiful stickers.
Kenedy Gaels Robotics team for lending us so many decorations for our pit and making us feel welcome at every stage.
Team AXOLOTL CECYTECH 11 Cd. del Conocimiento from Mexico for being our pit next-door neighbour and sharing so much with our students culturally.
And all the people who before, during, and after, made this trip possible!
Robotics Club is Open Now!
If you or your young person is interested in joining the Robotics Club, it runs on the following days:
Tuesdays and Wednesdays at lunchtime
Tuesdays after school, 3–4pm
All students are welcome to try out before they commit to joining the club, and we hope to see our future Worlds competitors there in the future!