Parents play an important role in helping students have a positive, rewarding, and meaningful robotics competition experience. Your encouragement and support can make a significant difference while still allowing students to take ownership of their learning and team experience.

How Parents Can Support Their Students

• Focus on Learning, Not Just Winning

• Encourage your child to enjoy the process of learning, problem-solving, designing, building, and competing. While competition results are exciting, the skills and experiences students gain along the way are what matter most.

• Celebrate Progress and Achievements

• Recognize your child’s effort, growth, and accomplishments—both big and small. Celebrate milestones, new skills, creative solutions, and lessons learned rather than focusing only on competition results.

• Maintain Perspective

• Teamwork can sometimes be challenging. When disagreements or team dynamics issues arise, remain calm and supportive. Remember that different students, parents, coaches, and teams may have different perspectives. Encourage your child to communicate respectfully and work through challenges constructively.

• Support, Don’t Direct

• Allow students to take ownership of their robot, code, strategy, engineering notebook, and team decisions. Parents should provide encouragement and guidance without completing work on behalf of the students.

• Please do not code, build, design, or make competition decisions for the team. Coaches are responsible for providing instruction and guidance, while students are expected to do the work and develop their own solutions.

Facilitate Extra Practice

Students benefit greatly from additional practice outside their regular team meetings. Parents are encouraged to help provide opportunities for their child to practice, review skills, and prepare for competitions.

For any additional team practice session outside scheduled coaching sessions, a parent or guardian must be present to supervise and ensure the safety of all students.

Promote Core Values

Help students represent Blaze Robotics positively by encouraging:

• Sportsmanship

• Responsibility

• Respect

• Teamwork

• Kindness

• Integrity

• A positive attitude

Our goal is to help students become not only better roboticists, but also responsible teammates and gracious competitors.

Community Service & Volunteer Opportunities

Our competition program relies on the support of our parent community. Volunteers help us provide a safe, organized, and successful experience for all teams throughout the season.

We strongly recommend a minimum of 6 volunteer hours per family, with a goal of approximately 30 volunteer hours per team. Sharing these responsibilities across families helps ensure that our team program and competition events run smoothly.

There are many ways to contribute based on your interests, skills, and availability.

Coach Assistant

During weekly coaching sessions, we will need one parent volunteer on a rotating basis for each 3-hour session.

Coach Assistants help the coach with:

• Supervising students

• Supporting students with problem-solving

• Helping students stay organized and on task

• Sorting and managing robotics parts and materials

• Assisting with general team activities

League Night Support

Help us create a smooth and memorable experience for students during League Nights.

Volunteer opportunities may include:

• Setting up competition fields

• Assisting with team scheduling

• Helping with team queuing

• Supporting the inspection process

• Assisting with event logistics

• Helping with other tasks throughout the evening

Tournament Support

Tournaments require a large team of volunteers to run successfully. Whether you have robotics experience or are completely new to competitions, there are opportunities to contribute.

Explore the available VEX volunteer roles to find a role that best matches your skills and interests.

Two of the most impactful opportunities are Judge and Head Referee.

Judge Role

Judges play an important role in recognizing students’ learning, teamwork, engineering process, and problem-solving throughout the competition.

Interested in becoming a tournament judge? Learn more about the REC Judge Training and Certification to get started.

Head Referee Role

We are seeking Certified Head Referees to support competitions this season. Head Referees play a critical role in ensuring that matches are conducted fairly, safely, and according to competition rules.

If you are interested in serving as a Head Referee, please complete the VEX IQ Robotics Competition Referee Training & Certification Course.

Together, We Build a Stronger Robotics Community

A successful competition season is a team effort—not only for the students and coaches, but also for our families and volunteers.

Thank you for supporting our students, respecting their ownership of the learning process, and contributing your time and talents to the Blaze Robotics community.