Plano’s AI & Robotics Academy brings home first place in world robotics competition
The AI & Robotics Academy, located in Plano, brought home first in the VEX IQ Worlds Robotics competition earlier this month.
Plano students won first place at the recent 2024 VEX IQ World Robotics Championship with a team called Inception from the AI & Robotics Academy, located in Plano.
The academy is an after-school program for middle and high school students that aims to foster STEM capabilities through academic courses, exploratory research opportunities and collaborative team-building activities and competitions.
Inception took home first place in the recent VEX IQ Worlds Robotics Championship, crowning the team the World Champion of Skills.
“It means a lot to our team,” Head Coach Kan Xu told Xinhua, a government news agency in China. Xu considers winning the awards as a testament to the students’ STEM skills and knowledge, which can help students understand similar devices they see around them, he told the publication.
At the VEX V5 Robotics Competition on February 24 in Abilene, the academy produced a skills score of 427, the highest in the world at the time, which was later tied by a Shanghai team that joined the team at worlds. There, the AI & Robotics machine won the Excellence Award, Tournament Champions and Robot Skills Champions, qualifying the team for the World Championship. However, a robot can only qualify in one event, so the AI & Robotics Inception team entered the worlds competition in the skills category.
