In McAllen, Texas, the McAllen school district recently held its inaugural “Tech Wars” robotic competition, which gave students the opportunity to compete against in each other in drone racing, a Battle Bot competition, and an unmanned vehicle competition.

Tech Wars took place on a football field, and according the Monitor, which is McAllen's newspaper, the idea behind creating Tech Wars came from McAllen ISD Superintendent J.A. Gonzalez.

“We wanted to give kids with these technology talents the opportunity to shine, so it’s not about the star quarterback or star pitcher or great swimmer or great volleyball, but now it’s about the great drone racer,” Gonzalez says.

“We want to create a name for kids based on this kind of talent and we know that it’s not about the robots, it’s about the teamwork, the collaboration, the critical-thinking.”

Gonzalez, who is a strong believer in this technology and its potential in society in the future, hopes that the district can expand on the success of the first event.

“Our dream is to have this stadium full one day and make it an invitational where we have other school districts and have multiple teams from other school districts here competing for points and competing to be best in the Valley,” Gonzalez says.

Tech Wars started with the UAS competition, featuring approximately 125 students. Students from all three McAllen high schools participated in the competition.

Ann Vega, McAllen ISD’s director of instructional technology and library services, says that the idea for this competition started in August 2017, and practice for it began in February.

“Many times they (students) get all this instruction about the mechanics of how everything works, but we wanted them to actually build things and to really apply everything that they’re learning in class,” Vega explains. “We really just wanted to have an event that made it fun.”

The UAS track course, which took up most of the football field, was shaped similar to a figure eight, and each team had to complete three laps around the course.

The teams consisted of a pilot that wore a virtual reality headset and flew the UAS, along with a co-pilot serving as navigator.

After the UAS competition, the Battle Bot Competition was next. That competition saw the three high schools build a fighting robot, and fight for the win on a wooden platform by the track.

The last event of the competition was an unmanned vehicle competition, which saw miniature modular trucks race three laps around the field in a course similar in shape to the UAS track.

Winners of each competition received trophies, as well as bragging rights for their school.