Event Partner FAQ

Yes, all Event Partners are required to complete a background check before hosting an event. General information regarding the background check can be found in the EP Background Check FAQ.

Click here for instructions regarding the Event Partner Background Check Process in RobotEvents.com.

Any questions regarding the background screening process can be directed to hr@roboticseducation.org

Click here for VEX marketing resources.

For information about the Virtual REC Foundation Summit, visit our Virtual REC Foundation Summit page.

A qualified event is one that a team can only register for after winning some award at another event. After you make your event a qualified event, other Event Partners will need to configure their events to make their winners eligible to attend your event. Contact your Regional Support Manager for help with this feature.

All available resources are located on the Event Documents and Resources page.

The REC Foundation sends regular emails to Event Partners with important program information and announcements. You can see all current and past Event Partner email messages on the VEX Forum Event Partner Discussion Board and archived here.

Visit our Contact Us page and click on the map to view Regional Support contacts by region.

Visit our Media page for REC Foundation logos and graphics.

Create a simple survey for your event that teams are asked to complete during registration by selecting "Edit Team Survey" at the top of the screen when editing your event to configure your questions.

Surveys may include the following questions:

• How many people are attending from your team?
• When will the team arrive?
• How many teams will bring engineering notebooks for Design Award judging?
• How many teams will have a STEM Research Project?

Questions can be formatted to provide open text responses or through a pre-populated drop-down list. Questions may be mandatory or optional. Once your survey is complete, teams will see a “TEAM INFO NEEDED!” statement on their RobotEvents.com dashboard.

Sometimes Event Partners need to manually add teams to an event. This may happen because a team shows up for an event without registering or may want to register after the registration deadline has passed. If the event has a registration fee, the team will have to pay you directly and not through RobotEvents.com.

After your event, use this selection to enter award winners. Event results are not officially recorded until filled in here.

Note: It is possible for more than one team to win the same award. There will be more than one Tournament Champion and it is not uncommon to have more than one Judges Award. Some events will give duplicate awards to the top high school and middle school team for Judges and Excellence.

Click on "Edit Event Awards." There are two parts to this screen. At the bottom, select an award to give at your event:

1. Click the arrow to the right of "Select an Award" and then pick the award name. The Overall Excellence and Division Excellence awards will only be used at very large events. Very few (if any) local events will give these. Use the Excellence Award for nearly all tournaments and leagues.
2. Repeat step one for each award you plan to give at your event.
3. The list to the right are invitational events that teams qualify for by winning awards at other events. Please check the qualifying criteria for different events before setting this up and ask your REC Foundation Manager if you have any questions.
4. Click "Submit."

Event Partners receive the ability to monitor the teams that have registered for their event(s). EPs also have the ability to see all of the teams that have registered in their own geographic region. A region is generally a US state, Canadian province, or a country.

Please follow these four steps to set up a RobotEvents.com account.

1. Go to http://www.robotevents.com and click "Log In" (top right-hand corner of the screen).
2. In the New Customers box, click "Create an Account."
3. Send your REC Foundation Regional Support Manager an email with the email address you used to register.
4. Your REC Foundation Regional Support Manager will go into the administrator section and enter your new ID as the event administrator for your tournament, and then let you know you can now access the system as an administrator.

This shows all the teams registered for the event. It also does two other important things:

1. Download a registration report as a CSV for your own use.
2. Most importantly, click "Download Tournament Manager Import Data" to create a data file that can be imported into Tournament Manager at the event. This will save you from having to enter all the teams into Tournament Manager by hand.

Leagues are generally open to all registered teams in a particular area, but the league Event Partner may create rules for how many league sessions each team may participate in. In other words, a league may have six sessions, but restrict each team to playing in only four sessions. Please refer to the League Play rules.

Any restrictions on registration must be approved by the REC Foundation in advance, so please contact your REC Foundation REC Foundation Manager to discuss your event. Please note that any VEX Worlds qualifying event must be open to any registered team. The only exception to this rule is for regional championships that require performance-based qualifications. For example, the US National Championship has entry criteria that require teams to win certain awards at other tournaments before registering for the event.

Non-VEX Worlds qualifying events may be restricted based on criteria set by the Event Partner. We encourage Event Partners to restrict events only in logical ways. Examples include: within a school district, for a particular city, teams all sponsored by one source, or those teams part of a special program such as Scouts or 4H. The REC Foundation reserves the right to evaluate your qualifying criteria for restricted events.

Event Partners running the VEX Robotics Competition may also choose to run VEX U events, but make sure to check on RobotEvents.com for the game current rules. VEX U rules are NOT the same as VRC. College teams and high school teams do NOT participate in the same events.

In some areas you may have enough interest to hold a middle school-only event, but in most areas the middle school teams compete with other teams in their respective program. Talk to your REC Foundation representative about middle school-only events.

There are a wide variety of up-to-date resource documents on our Event Documents and Resources page.