As an engineer with more than 20 years of experience, plus a part time educator with more than 6 year of experience, I have chance to participate different STEM activities and competition.

One really excited STEM competition is robotics, since about 25 years ago, two family build the FIRST in their own backyard, and that is the Mickey moment of youth robotics competition, I really admired their brave and vision. Over 25 years, the FIRST continue grow and become the biggest youth robotics competition in the world, the achievement is amazing, and the growth rate is unbelievable. The similar story was repeated by VEX, which was built since 2004, grow bigger year over year, become the number 2 youth robotics competition in the world.

But, one minor concern for FIRST and VEX is, although they become huge, number wide, FIRST has about 72000 teams at 2019, VEX has about 20000 teams at 2019, but about 75% to 80% of the team was from north america, United State and Canada per say. Although it has growing fast in other country, but all of the other country has only contribute about 20% up to 25% of the population, which seems a little bit weird.

To dig deeper and find the root cause, we realized that there are couple of biggest obstacles for both FIRST and VEX.

1. the cost of participation, even the FLL cost more than $900 to build a team, for FRC, it requires more than $8000 at minimum as one year budget, besides some of the rich school, it is hard to imagine how many of the less fortune school can afford to build the team.
2. the coaching, although the FIRST and VEX become so popular in school, but the coaching still mostly rely on the school teacher, and fewer mentor from outside of the school, this become one of the bottleneck.
3. required skill set, the required skill set for low level competition is relatively low, but for higher level competition, it is much higher.

Overall, it makes the youth robotics competition becomes the richer community and school’s game, and huge amount of the low income community left behind, let alone the large number of developing countries.

Fortunately, we found MakeX robotics competition, backed by Makeblock, one of the biggest K-12 STEM education device developer, their popular small robot — — mBot is so affordable, it has even been used as the toy, but its true potential is on STEM education.

MakeX robotics competition, at the 2019 season, already reach to more than 63 different countries, and hosted more than 800 bigger competition (not count the smaller competition), with more than 12000 teams participated, it becomes such as big trend, and gain strong momentum in 2019, and become the number 3 youth robotics competition in the world.

So what makes the MakeX grow so fast, and break into even the home of the FIRST and VEX (at North America, both United State and Mexico host the competition).

The reason is exactly the answer from the top three concerns.

1. cost, the cost to participate the MakeX competition, include both the cost of robot and ongoing competition is much lower.
2. coaching, since it is based on the very popular Scratch like mBlock, any parents with a little bit of knowledge in technology can start and tutor his own kids.
3. skill set, for kids to participate, the only requirement is the curiosity, its spirit is creativity, teamwork, sharing and fun, with the STEAM education as its core, it removed some of the non core from the competition, it is a pure competition for robotics. Easy to get start, and easy to hook up.

It is just the beginning of the year of 2020, and from MakeX official announcement, their goal for 2020 is to reach to more than 120 countries and areas, with more than 20000 teams to participate, and become a even better name brand in youth robotics competition field.

But, the good story for MakeX is not stopped here, not all the kids are really like to or good at robotics, will those kids leave behind, no, for 2020 MakeX competition, the Spark competition will be part of the MakeX, this will allow the team to build their STEAM solution and compete on project based, this will greatly expand to lots of students, and make the MakeX competition further more attractive.

With all of those reasons, I hope I answered the question, why MakeX is my favorite choice as robotics competition?

Please leave comments and suggestions here, I am eager to hear your opinions and feedback.

The original post was posted at Jan 25th, 2020

The link of original post: https://medium.com/@youthinnolab/why-makex-is-my-favorite-choice-as-robotics-competition-354d5e722ee