St. Louis, 2026
The VEX Robotics World Championship is the biggest stage the sport has: thousands of students, qualified through a season of regional competition, converging on one arena in the United States. In 2026, at the VEX V5 event in St. Louis, the High School Division title went to Team 77789A — “FA-SUPREME SQUAD” — a team built in OpenKids' Competition & Awards programme on Orchard Road, Singapore.
A division championship at Worlds is the kind of line that looks sudden on a poster. It never is. This one was six seasons in the making — and behind those six seasons, a pathway that starts with children barely old enough to hold a screwdriver.
Where the six seasons started
Our robotics team entered championship competition in 2018, in the VEX season known as Turning Point. What followed was the unglamorous part of the sport that highlight reels skip: season after season of designing, building, breaking and rebuilding robots — each campaign starting from a new game reveal and ending with lessons carried into the next.
That is the real curriculum of competitive robotics. A season is a full engineering project run by teenagers: requirements, prototypes, testing, documentation, iteration under deadline. Six of those in a row is why, by 2026, the team on the St. Louis field was not improvising — it was executing.
“Home of VEX World Champions.”
The pipeline behind the team
The less visible half of the story is where champion team members come from. In the OpenKids network, the road to a V5 world title starts years earlier and several rungs lower — often with a seven-year-old building a first robot in an OpenKids coding classroom.
- Our STEAM & AI programme teaches coding, engineering and VEX IQ robotics from age 4 — its teams have been VEX IQ Singapore champions four years running, 2023–2026
- Our Competition & Awards programme takes the strongest builders from age 10 into full championship-season campaigns
- By graduation, each student carries a multi-year engineering record that universities read — notebooks, competition results, real machines
Four consecutive national VEX IQ titles feeding a programme with six seasons of V5 experience: that is what stood on the field in St. Louis. If you are weighing this path for your own child, we have written an honest, costs-and-all assessment of whether VEX robotics is worth it.
Why competition sits at the centre of the method
None of this is an accident of one talented cohort. The network's teaching method runs on three verbs — create, compete, compound. Children make real things from day one; the work then meets the world at exhibitions, award juries and VEX arenas, where real stakes teach what classrooms cannot; and every result rolls forward into the next stage. A world championship is simply the most visible point on that loop — the same loop that runs, at smaller scale, in every one of the network's 80+ centres across 12 markets.
What a world title actually changes
For the students, the trophy is the smallest part. The durable assets are the ones the season forced into existence: the ability to run a hard engineering project end to end, to perform under a timer in front of a crowd, and to document work to a standard a stranger can audit. Those are the artefacts university admissions officers actually read — and they outlast any single result.
For families across the network, the title is proof that the ladder holds: the child sketching a robot at seven and the team lifting a world championship at seventeen are on the same staircase. Where robotics fits among Singapore's options is mapped in our guide to the best coding and robotics programmes for kids.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who won the 2026 VEX V5 Robotics World Championship High School division?
Team 77789A “FA-SUPREME SQUAD”, from OpenKids' Competition & Awards programme in Singapore, won the High School Division title at the 2026 VEX V5 Robotics World Championship, held in St. Louis, USA.
How long did it take the team to win a world title?
The OpenKids robotics team had competed across six championship seasons since entering VEX in 2018, during the Turning Point season. The 2026 High School Division title in St. Louis capped that six-season build.
How does a child get from beginner robotics to a VEX world championship team?
In the OpenKids network, children start with coding and VEX IQ robotics in the STEAM & AI programme — whose teams have won VEX IQ Singapore four years running, 2023–2026 — and the strongest builders progress from age 10 into OpenKids championship robotics teams.
