Changing Focus Back To Generating and Mapping 1'000'000 Robotics Talents
Last year, Robotex grew too big and we’re now pulling the focus back to our core strength.
--
Robotex got started 18 years ago in Estonia when there were no robotics competitions in the country at which university students could match their engineering and coding skills. The sole purpose then was to kickstart the robotics education in Estonia by giving students a problem and having them build a custom robot that could solve it. While adding the competition element for them to put more effort into it.
Over the years, other robotics competitions started to pop up around the world, as well as in Estonia, involving students of different levels. That’s when we also started to broaden the target audience and soon hosted competitions for people with various skill sets. There was something for everyone — kindergarten & elementary school kids could discover the basis of robotics, while the basic & high school students learned to use different sensors and university students & graduates could already build more complex systems.
At the same time, the concept of Robotex also evolved from just hosting competitions to running a full festival with competitions, speeches and workshops, as well as a full-scale EXPO showcasing the current top solutions in robotics. This, in turn, started to attract plenty of international interest that helped to turn the individual festival first into the biggest in Europe and then on the planet — that is when counting the number of robots at the event.
Robotex goes global
With this kind of traction, people around the world started to notice Robotex and a new idea was born: “Let’s build a global network of Robotex.” With the main purpose to create a community of likeminded roboticists.
In 2017, a team from Cyprus decided to host its first local Robotex competition that ended up being an overnight success with over 200 teams attending.
In 2018, China, Colombia and India also hosted their first festivals with Afghanistan, Anguilla, Armenia, Guatemala, Greece, Japan, Mali, Monaco, Nigeria and the USA also joining the Robotex global family.
In 2019, we plan to grow our network to at least 25 countries running Robotex programs locally. And then reach the magical number of 100 by 2025.
The worth for this kind of a global community lies in the notion that we exist in a borderless world where people from different continents could easily cooperate. But we still do not as the general social networks have not actually brought people together and we still need narrow communities to make this change happen.
Therefore, we’re now bringing the like-minded leaders together to create local robotics networks and then join them together.
We will generate the future
Meanwhile, we had started to play around with another idea: “Education is only valuable if it’s used to create innovation.”
In our perspective, it doesn’t mean that every person that’s learning anything should become an inventor or a founder. However, eventually, everyone that has the knowledge should use it to help produce innovation.
For that reason, we generated the concepts of entrepreneurial and innovation challenges at which teams need to build robots that solve real-world problems. At the Entrepreneurial Challenge, teams should present working prototypes that would solve problems they chose, while the innovation challenges would give them problems they need to build solutions for. Both were going to help us distinguish the talent whose journey to follow in the coming years.
In 2018, we managed to round up 16 teams for the Entrepreneurial Challenge and hosted three different innovation challenges, including Elisa AI Challenge, Starship Animal Rescue and Taxify Challenge.
With that, we took it as our own goal to start more programs that push people to use emerging technology solutions and help generate the next 50’000 robotics projects around the world, over the course of the next 10 years. And the plan was to go even bigger!
Coming back to the initial vision
All this growth, both in terms of countries on board and activities being run, seemed awesome at the start. But then we realised that it brought two problems with it.
First, we were drifting away from our strengths as the organisation. As said, Robotex got started to educate future talents and that’s what the organisation is still strong at.
Second, the innovation generation takes a different type of work, including other people and even more funding. All while we could double down to build the part of the organisation that generates talents.
So after lots of thinking and reflection, we decided to split the innovation part off from Robotex. The problems we were going to solve in this part still matter, however, there will be another organisation that’s going to work on solving them in the future.
As for Robotex, we will double down on generating and mapping the 1'000'000 robotics talents.
We wrote more about this in the e-mail to global Robotex Family that you can read as follows:
Hi Robotex Family!
Hope your year ended with a bang and started even better.
For us, we had a chance to look back at everything we’ve been able to achieve with Robotex over the course of last two years, and thanks to many of you — it’s been awesome!
- 16 countries with local Robotex operations (and 20 others potentially starting soon).
- 4 local Robotex festivals (Cyprus, China, Colombia and India) in 2018.
- 1 international Robotex festival with attendees from 54 countries, including 987 robots from 44 countries.
- Companies such as ESA and XPRIZE offering support for future collaboration.What more could we want.!?
However, this reflective time also gave us the understanding that we’ve started to lose the focus that made Robotex so great in the first place. Mostly due to my personal ambitions to change the course of humanity. This means that we took upon ourselves to solve two connected but different problems and it seems that the way further is to split them up. Not because we could not solve them both (if we’d have way more funding). But because they need totally different approaches, and our organisation is not yet big enough to be able to solve both of them simultaneously.
I’m talking about the following two goals: 1) Generating and mapping 1’000’000 engineering talents — robotics education & 2) Speeding up the adoption process of emerging technologies and helping to create 50000 startups — innovation programs.
What does this actually mean for Robotex and our global community?
We see that the way forward is to bring Robotex back to its initial focus and our core values that include promoting engineering as a path for students and helping them evolve their skills via various education programs. Meanwhile mapping this type of talent around the world and helping them find their next steps.
This means that Robotex should from now on be about the following activities:
1) Make running robotics competitions its core focus.
2) Teach teachers that can actually help the talent arise.
3) Generate a database to map talents.+ 2020 and onwards, we can think about adding the following activities: 1. Advanced talent training programs, 2. Consult local authorities on education development, 3. Run additional robotics events & 4. Add other tech fields into competitions run by us.
In more detail, the first three activities can be explained as follows:
1) Robotics competitions as a core for Robotex. We should start by analysing all the challenges being currently run in Robotex network and find out which are the ones that help to inspire the youth to take engineering as a path forward and which of them teach real skills, while getting rid of duplicates (it does not make sense to run two similar competitions that teach the same skills because of variety, as it generates unnecessary overhead for us) + we should come up with some more advanced challenges to attract higher level talent. This is something that the corporations, universities and local governments actually care about — because all of them see the lack of future talents and want to support programs that make a difference in this. Meanwhile, they are also the parties that will be able to generate extra value and inspire people even more by showcasing their innovation at our EXPOs or workshops. This means that those parts of our activities should first and utmost focus on education and inspiration, not for helping those companies sell more. If the latter happens, it’s wonderful. But it cannot be our first value for them. And thus we might see our events become smaller in size but bigger in impact with high-level competitions, inspiring exhibitions and top talent.
2) Teacher training is the second activity we have to cover because there is a lack of robotics educators around the world and even fewer of them can actually help talents get the skills they need to be valuable for the corporations or to be able to start their own companies. And we’re the best for this job as we see the real needs of the market via our core activity — running the competitions. So we now need to work to put together the curriculum(s) that we could present our local authorities, who would be the ones paying for it, and start teaching teachers.
3) Generate a database to map talent, first via excel and later developing a specific platform for that. We’re the ones that can do this as we’re the ones seeing the talent and their skills via the competitions. Meanwhile, it’s needed because the corporations and the universities want to see who are the best of the best and offer them jobs and scholarships directly, based on their results up to this moment and other metrics — and they are willing to pay for that if we’d just build and maintain it.
Focusing on just those activities gives the outer market a better understanding of what Robotex is and this way helping us spread our mission even better. At the same time, these types of activities also enable all of us, the local Robotex organisations, better serve the needs of our local corporations, universities and other authorities.
What about the international aspect?
This needs to stay there. We shall keep organising the Robotex International festival and the other continental Robotex festivals, e.g. Robotex Asia and Robotex LatAm, to give talents a way to compare their skills with those from other countries and give our local partners a chance to attract foreign talent.
Meanwhile, the fact that those festivals will be moving between various countries takes away the fear from the local partners that their support will be used to educate foreign talent and not only be used locally (we’ve already gotten such feedback in Estonia). Thus, just the partners with international mindset will be supporting the bigger festivals and others will continue helping us on the local level.
What will happen with the innovation programs and the vision for 50000 startups?
The need to introduce emerging technologies that will be around 10–20 years from now and to help speed up the process of their use is still something that the world needs.
There are awesome discoveries being made around the world by researchers of all sorts and we should try to implement those more and faster.
However, this needs to happen separately from Robotex. Perhaps there will be a chance to collaborate with the organisation working on that — e.g. start educating and mapping the talents for those fields once they become more adapted.
How will this impact Robotex International 2019?
Robotex International 2019 will still happen in Tallinn as pre-planned but we’ll bring all of it back to one venue like it used to be.
In 2018, we tested the concept of having the conference in a separate venue on various frontier tech topics, e.g. autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity, industry 4.0, space tech and much more. And the conference itself was a success on multiple levels (80 speakers from 20 countries being listened to by over 900 people from 54 countries). But we saw that it started to generate problems such as people being lost at wrong venues, communication towards two different audiences at the same time being a mess etc.
Thus in 2019, Robotex International will all happen at the same time, only at one venue with the emphasis on the competitions. There will still be the EXPO with companies showcasing their innovative products and workshops held at their booths or specific rooms to teach different skills. We might even have some speakers show up at the main stage to talk about educating talents or presenting their innovation. But all of those activities will be focused on the talents and how to get more of them.
As for the conference on emerging technologies — this will be organised by another organisation at another time with potentially us helping them.
—
So in short, we see that Robotex should focus on generating and mapping the talent in the robotics field, as this is our strength. And we’ll be doing it via running competitions, teaching teachers and mapping talents + growing the network internationally.
Robotex International (November 29 — December 1, 2019) is the biggest robotics festival on the planet. The competitions take place at Tondiraba Ice Hall, Varraku 14, Tallinn.
Throughout the year, local Robotex festivals with various competitions, expos, speeches and workshops will happen around the world, including in China, Colombia, Cyprus, Greece, India, Japan, Mali, Nigeria, the United States etc.
Robotex is a global robotics education network, focusing on robotics (incl. AI & Drones) education. We run education & teacher training programs and festivals with competitions, expos, speeches and workshops.
If you’d like to set up a local Robotex organisation in your country, then contact us via sander@robotex.ee.
