World Robot Olympiad
About World Robot OlympiadTM
World Robot Olympiad started in 2004. According to its mission statement, it aims to bring young people from all around the world together to develop their creativity, design and problem -solving skills through challenging and educational robot building competitions and activities.
WRO® was started to promote robotics to young people all around the world. By learning more about robotics, we hope to draw young people’s interest towards STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects and inspire the innovators of tomorrow. WRO is a truly global contest dedicated to science, technology, and education with challenging and educative robotics competitions. Using creativity, inventiveness and a methodical approach to problems they develop the skills needed to address any situation.
The competition is open to young people aged 8 to 25 in 4 categories (Regular, Open, Football, Advanced Robotics Challenge) and 6 age groups. In the race, teams build their robots from LEGO MINDSTORMS® elements, but other control, building materials or programming languages are allowed, depending on the competition category.
What people find the most interesting is that each year the different challenges focus on real world problems. Everything, like finding sustainable solutions for climate change or protecting biodiversity or inventing methods for precision farming and preventing wasting food, can be related to the life that the teams know.
WRO tournaments are organized in more than 70 countries and each season new countries join the contest. Top teams from the national rounds earn an invitation to the World Championships International Final held in every November and hosted by different countries.
The relationship between World Robot Olympiad and Edutus University
Edutus University was established in 1992 in Tatabánya, Hungary. It’s a student-oriented university with students and teachers having a close and personal relationship. Edutus became a university of applied sciences in 2018.
Edutus is a non-state-owned higher educational institution, maintained by Edutus Nonprofit Ltd. The University recognized by the Hungarian Accreditation Committee does its best and provide its fresh graduates excellent chances in the labor market. With our constantly renewing offer of specializations in our training programs (e.g. castle tourism, SSC specialist, content marketing, innovative businesses, e-business, facility management, and laser technologies) we provide our students with knowledge and competences which can be directly utilized in practice. By launching dual study programs in 2017 they further strengthen the practice-oriented approach which has always characterized the University.
Edutus also places great emphasis on encouraging young people to be interested in the STEM fields, as well as on talent fostering. An outstanding tool to do this is to organize robot programming competitions. Edutus is the regional organizer of the international First Lego League and has won the right to be the national organizer of World Robot Olympiad since 2014. In the first year we started with only 11 teams and thanks to the bigger and bigger interest we welcomed 180 teams to our National Final by 2019.
Edutus University won the right to organize the 16th WRO International Final in 2019. Hungary was the first European country to host this competition and welcomed over 420 teams and 12.000 visitors from all over the world in November 2019.
Mr. Zoltán Szögi (CEO of Edutus Nonprofit Ltd.) has been elected as a member of the Advisory Board by the WRO Association for the successful organization of the International Final and for his work on the Central European extension, as Edutus’ goal is to expand WRO competition and introduce it to other European countries as well. With the support and experience of Edutus University we work on that this amazing gathering will be held from now on in Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Georgia, Serbia, Croatia and Slovakia. Moreover in 2017 Edutus University achieved that the WRO® LEGO® Robot Competition in Hungary became one of the financially supported study competitions which was a huge step forward and we aim to achieve the same in the above mentioned countries as well.
More information: https://wro-association.org