Concordia Robotics Cracks the Global Top 3 at VEX Worlds
Five students from Concordia finished 3rd in the world in the VEX V5 Skills Challenge, marking a major milestone for Concordia’s robotics program.
When Team 13212D was recognized for 3rd place at the 2026 VEX Robotics World Championship Skills, the first thing the five students said was not about the trophy. They said, “We could’ve done better.”
That sentence says a great deal about the team. What’s more remarkable is that four of the five members are high school freshmen, and the fifth is a sophomore.
Each year, about 6% of qualified high school VEX V5 teams worldwide make it to the Worlds, the pinnacle of VEX robotics competition.
The result came from months of disciplined engineering. The team rebuilt, retested, coded, drove, broke parts, fixed them, and ran the cycle again. The pressure ran higher than usual because they had also won the APAC Championship just weeks before Worlds, leaving little time to reset before St. Louis. At Worlds, that work held up against some of the most experienced robotics programs in the world.
In the Skills Challenge, each robot runs the field on its own. Teams receive three 60-second autonomous attempts and three 60-second driver-control attempts. The best autonomous score and the best driver score are combined into one final skills score. Concordia’s Team 13212D posted a perfect 119 in autonomous and a perfect 119 in driver control, for a combined score of 238. The two teams ahead of them posted the same score. Tiebreakers decided the final ranking.
For one stretch of the competition, Concordia sat at number one in the world.
That achievement did not come from one student or one lucky run. Yolanda L wrote the autonomous routines that produced three perfect scores. Ethan H built and rebuilt the robot throughout the season, then drove it under the year’s highest pressure. Mak T read the field and led the strategy. John D captained, scouted other teams, and brought back information the team could use. Jessica J ran the booth, represented the team in conversations with judges and visitors, and kept morale steady through long competition days.
Worlds was more than a leaderboard. In the pit aisles, Concordia students exchanged ideas with teams from other countries and schools they had only heard about. They studied drive bases, intake systems, autonomous logic, and match strategy. They asked questions and shared ideas with other teams.
The medal will be remembered, along with the perfect skills score and the brief moment at No.1 in the world. The stronger story is that five Concordia students walked into one of the most competitive robotics environments in the world and carried themselves as if they belonged there. They left with third place, a clear sense of what still needs to improve, and three more years ahead of them.
