78116A Habs_CyberSquad makes history at VEX Robotics World Championship!

We are proud to announce that our robotics team, 78116A Habs_CyberSquad, has been awarded the Excellence Award at the 2025 VEX Robotics World Championship held in Dallas, Texas. This prestigious honour represents the highest accolade in the world’s largest school robotics competition, recognising all-around excellence in engineering design, coding, collaboration, and innovation.

This remarkable achievement is not only a testament to the team’s relentless dedication and technical expertise but also a historic milestone. Habs_CyberSquad is the first UK team to win the Excellence Award at the higher programme level, and only the second UK team across all age groups to receive this award in the nearly 20-year history of the competition.

The VEX Excellence Award is given to the team that exemplifies overall excellence in building a high-quality robotics programme. To be selected from thousands of teams from around the globe is a profound honour, and one that reflects the highest standards of performance, perseverance, and innovation.

We are incredibly proud of our students and grateful to all the mentors, sponsors, and supporters who have been part of this journey.

Mr Ryan writes about the competition and the incredible work that the team put in over a three-year period to achieve this phenomenal feat.

“The 2025 VEX V5RC Middle School World Championship represented the end of 78116A Habs_CyberSquad’s third year of competitive robotics, culminating in the achievement of a world title via the overall ‘Excellence Award’.

The team formed in September 2022, initially competing in the VEX IQ competition where teams engineer a robot from plastic components. Within their first two seasons, they won multiple top awards across regional competitions in the UK, as well as the ‘Innovate Award’ at the National Championship and ‘Build Award’ at the World Championship for robust robot design.

This season, the team grew to eight people including:

Team Leader Joseph (10R1), Engineering Notebook Designer Ishan (10C1), Builder Ayaan (10J2), CAD Designer Max (10S1), Builder and Notebook Designer Oscar (10J2), Programmer Isaac (10R2), Driver William (10J2) and Sponsorship and Outreach Lead Jaiden (10S2).

In March, the team were crowned UK National Champions. They also won Tournament Champion and Skills Champion, earning the ‘triple crown’ – being the first Middle School team to achieve this feat in national history.

This led to their qualification to the World Championship, where they competed in Dallas, Texas.

The competition had an early start, with a 5:30am flight from Heathrow to Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. On the first two days, they enjoyed the Dallas sights, visiting the JFK Memorial Plaza and spending time in an escape room, as well as shopping at a Target and Walmart. We enjoyed traditional TexMex cuisine at local restaurants, including fantastic quesadillas and tacos at ‘Uno Mas’ as well as American specials at Chipotle and Chick-fil-A.

The first day of competition included the parade of nations, where Joseph and Ishan represented the UK as a part of the opening ceremony, with Joseph bearing the flag. On day one, the team focused on setting competitive skills scores, where robots compete individually in both driver-control and programming to score as many points as possible via interaction and scoring of game elements. CyberSquad’s 81-point total placed them 33rd at Worlds, out of 2840 teams which participated across the season in the skills challenge, comfortably the highest in the UK.

Day two consisted of the teams’ qualification ‘group-stage’ matches, 2V2 bouts against an opposing alliance with the aiming of scoring more points via autonomous and driver strategy. The team progressed through these matches with an almost perfect 8-2 record, placing them 3rd out of the 80 teams in their division, and giving them a high seed for the elimination bracket round, where they partnered with US Open Champion ‘Blue Army’ from California.

In the elimination rounds on day three, CyberSquad and their alliance partner progressed seamlessly before unfortunately losing by a narrow margin in the Quarter Final, nevertheless being the highest outcome of any European team in the past two years. Then came the final aspect of the competition – the awards. The team received special tickets to sit in the front-row of the VEX Dome in the Convention Centre, a mammoth 10,000-seater stadium which hosts the world finals and gives the top prizes.

Within the closing ceremony, CyberSquad were astounded to be awarded the Excellence Award. This is the most coveted prize in all of VEX Robotics, representing excellence in all aspects of the competition including matches, skills, and a top-level engineering notebook and team interviews.

It crowned the team as overall World Champions in the world’s largest robotics competition, the first European team to ever do so in Middle School VRC. The award established them as the best VEX Robotics team in the world, out of the circa 6,000 in their age category from over 50 countries, with 20,000 teams competing in all of VEX.

The team is incredibly proud of this achievement, and extend their gratitude to their teachers and the DT department, in particular, Mr Ryan and Ms Fagan, who accompanied them on the trip and have pioneered the VEX program within the school, allowing them to constantly learn, improve, and develop over the course of their three years competing, now being crowned champions of the world.”

We are incredibly proud of the creativity, ambition and courage shown by the boys. Their ability to design, prototype, problem-solve, and engineer under pressure, and to do so at the highest level, is a truly brilliant achievement.

Winning the Excellence Award is not only a testament to their technical skill and determination, but also to their strength as a team.

Congratulations on your outstanding success, not just in representing Habs, but in proudly representing the UK on a global stage.