BEST, Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology, is a national 6-week robotics competition in the United States held each fall, designed to help interest high school students in possible engineering careers.

The competition began in Dallas, Texas in 1993. Two Texas Instruments engineers Ted Mahler and Steve Marum had seen the work Woodie Flowers was doing with his students at MIT, and they wondered why they could not extend this idea to high school students. They began with one small hub, and BEST later expanded. It started with 14 schools and 221 students. Currently, BEST has hubs across the country. Any school may start a team, and there is no cost to participate. There are approximately 9,000 students, 600+ teams, with 28 hubs, and 3 regional's.

Each team is given a kit of parts which they use to construct a robot. This kit includes parts such as wood and PVC, along with the RC components necessary to control the robot. However, not every item on the parts list is supplied by BEST. The final robot must fit in a 2 foot cube at the beginning of each round of competition; once a round has started, the robot can expand to be bigger than this size with retractable arms, etc. The robot must also weigh under 24 pounds. The game task is different each year, but historically the robot has often needed an arm with different grabbing abilities. One year the game centered on team work to try and get students to work together. The winning teams from local competition sites, or hubs, advance to regional championship sites after the local competition has ended.

The hubs rely on local financial support from businesses and universities. Anyone can start a new hub serving a minimum of eight teams. On average, the cost for the first year of running a hub with 24 teams is $28,000.

BEST Robotics includes two elements: a robot competition, in which teams attempt to score as many points as possible in head-to-head competition, and the BEST award. The BEST award is more complex, encompassing such tasks as writing a high-quality technical notebook or engineering journal, designing a web site, an interview, delivering an oral presentation to a panel of judges, and creating a table display booth.

BEST encourages its teams to follow an engineering process, similar to the engineering process used in many engineering jobs. This gives students a taste of what they may have to do in future engineering jobs. It also hopes to get students excited about the field of engineering and more likely to go into it. Although BEST has not been able to keep up with alumni to see if BEST has had an effect on their career path, similar robotics competitions, like FIRST, show that activities like BEST do have a higher rate of students going into science and engineering related fields.

Another challenge teams involved in BEST face is limited materials--the primary construction materials used in BEST are simple and easily formed. These materials include PVC pipe, string, plywood, a limited quantity of sheet metal, and a bit of aluminum, as well as miscellaneous hardware, 2 large motors and 2 small motors, and the electronics necessary to run these motors and the 3 provided servos. At the beginning of competition, the robot is checked over to make sure that no illegal parts are used. Originally, old printers were also part of the BEST kit and printer parts could be used on the machine. The limited materials make students think much more creatively with what they are given

2005 Mission to Hubble
2004 BEST Fever
2003 Transfusion Confusion
2002 Warp X
2001 RAD to the CORE
2000 Pandemonium in the Smithsonian
1999 Rocket Race: The Alien Escape
1998 Toxic Troubles
1997 Dynamite Duel
1996 Block N' Load
1995 TOTALly aweSUM
1994 Bumble Rumble
1993 PVC Insanity