After coaching VEX teams for the past few years, I’ve noticed something that surprises a lot of parents.
The teams that keep winning aren’t always the most “talented” or the most creative.
They’re the teams that were willing to spend months doing boring things:
- Rebuilding drivetrains
- Changing gear ratios
- Tuning PID
- Rerunning skills
- Rewriting autonomous code
From the outside, it looks like low-level repetition.
The Part Most People Miss
The strongest teams don’t start by deeply understanding theory.
They start by building, running, failing, fixing, and repeating.
Only after a lot of hands-on experience do they begin to recognize patterns:
- Is this a structure problem?
- A transmission problem?
- A control problem?
- A strategy problem?
And only then do the “why” questions really make sense.
- Why does this design work better?
- Why does this strategy score more points?
- Why is this approach more reliable under pressure?
These “whys” are not taught first. They grow out of experience.
The Common Mistake
Meanwhile, many struggling teams reverse this order.
They want to innovate too early. They want to fully understand everything before they’ve built enough.
The result is usually the same: unstable robots, fragile code, and inconsistent competition results.
A Lesson Beyond Robotics
I’ve come to believe this isn’t just about robotics. It’s about how humans actually learn.
Real learning almost always follows this order:
How → What → Why
And the teams that keep winning are simply the ones who were allowed to follow that path.
