Funding
A fixed budget and a shop of upgrades. Every purchase is a trade-off the team has to be able to defend.
The Venture Bot series
Plan the venture. Pitch it. Then put your code in the arena.
Venture Bot is Haxios Learning's competition series for high school and college teams of three to five. Students build a robot program, plan the budget and strategy behind it, pitch that plan to judges, then compete in a virtual arena. It's built around something every working engineer learns eventually: engineering isn't 100% of the work.
Why "venture"
The competition is the excuse. The plan is the lesson.
Explaining your business, technical and design decisions clearly, with a well-reasoned plan behind them, matters as much as the engineering itself. Getting a project funded, winning your manager's support and getting customers excited are all part of the job.
So Venture Bot asks students to do both. They write code and put it head-to-head with other teams, and they present their decisions and strategy to a panel of judges from industry.
Management support
A judging panel of professionals and business leaders scores the pitch. A plan the team can't explain doesn't survive them.
Participant excitement
Matches are screened publicly with live commentary, and students are interviewed as they watch their bots perform for the first time.
The four decision areas
Every team decides four things. Judges score those same four.
These are the questions a team should be able to answer out loud before they present. The goal isn't a right answer. It's to have one, and to be able to say why.
| Decision area | Questions the team should be able to answer |
|---|---|
| Team organization & role plan | Who owns code, who owns strategy, who owns the configuration, who presents? What happens if your programmer is stuck at 8:00 PM the night before the submission deadline? Who makes the final call when you disagree? |
| Budget & configuration | What did you buy, and what did you give up to afford it? Which single purchase matters most to your strategy? If your budget were cut 20%, what would you drop? |
| Programming language & technology | Why this language for this team? Who already knows it? What does it let you do in the arena that another choice would not? What is your fallback plan? |
| Arena strategy | How do you actually win a match? Are you playing to score points, to run efficiently, to hold position or to manage the clock? What does your bot do in the first ten seconds? What beats you, and what is your answer to it? |
"Ask what have you decided? more often than what are you thinking?"
Teams stall because they won't commit. The most useful intervention a coach can make is forcing a decision to be made and written down. That's also why coaches advise and students decide: every decision made for a team is a decision the team cannot explain to the judges.
Defending a choice out loud is what turns a guess into a strategy. A team that has made all four decisions, even imperfectly, will present well and code well.
Scoring
One judged component. Two measured ones.
| Weight | Component | How it's determined |
|---|---|---|
| 30% | Judged presentation | Five categories scored 1–10 by a judging panel. |
| 50% | Match wins | Cumulative across all rounds. Reaching the match time limit counts as a loss for both teams. |
| 20% | Arena Control / Arena Craft | Cumulative across all rounds, combining energy efficiency, points scored against points conceded, accuracy and decisiveness. |
Arena scoring weights are published to teams in advance so they can plan against them. Judges' scores are not shown to teams.
The five judged categories
- Overall preparedness and organizationof the presentation itself.
- Team roles and design planwho owns what, and why.
- Budget strategycan they clearly communicate their decisions?
- Programming language strategycan they clearly communicate their decisions?
- Arena strategycan they clearly communicate their decisions?
- Presentation length
- 2 to 3.5 minutes, hard cut-off
- Judges listen for
- Reasoning, not orthodoxy
Judges score how clearly the plan is explained and how well it's thought through, not whether they'd have chosen it themselves. A conventional strategy the team cannot explain scores badly. An unconventional one, clearly reasoned, scores well. That's the skill that gets projects funded.
Run of show
Two days from strangers to a screened match.
The format below is the conference edition, as run over a Thursday-to-Saturday weekend. The same sequence stretches to a semester unit: form, decide, pitch, submit, compete.
Most students have never done anything like this before, and they have roughly one full day between team formation and the submission deadline. The schedule is built to make those hours count.
- Team size
- 3–5 students, flexible with turnout
- Hard deadline
- Final code submitted the night before matches
- Configuration final
- After presentations; choices published to all teams
- Code
- Can still change until the submission deadline
-
THURSDAY · EVENING
Form teams, meet your coach
The competition and format are introduced. Teams form, coaches are assigned, the portal and the configuration chooser are explained. Co-working stays open late with technical support on hand.
-
FRIDAY · MORNING
Office hours: decide and commit
Teams experiment with configurations and the chooser tool. Coaches circulate, unblock, and push the team toward written decisions in all four areas. Get at least one bot working in the practice arena.
-
FRIDAY · AFTERNOON
Present to the judges
Each team pitches its brief, strategy and configuration decisions. Configuration choices are then final and made public on the portal.
-
FRIDAY · UNTIL THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE
Practice rounds and iteration
Dedicated experimentation time with technical help available. Get a working submission in well before the deadline, not a perfect one at the last minute. Then confirm it went through.
-
SATURDAY
Matches screened, winners announced
Selected battles are screened publicly during the day. Winners are announced at the evening awards ceremony.
Who's in the room
Coaches advise. Students decide.
Three volunteer roles make a Venture Bot event work. Each has a clear lane, and those lines protect the students' learning.
Team coach
Professionals, business leaders and industry volunteers who sit with a team and keep it organized, unblocked and on schedule.
- Force role clarity early
- Drive decisions to closure
- Protect the timeline and cut scope
- Ask the question behind the question
- Never write the team's code
- Never make the team's decisions
- Never write the presentation
Competition judge
A panel of assigned volunteers who score each team's strategy presentation against the five published categories.
- Score articulation and reasoning
- Every judge scores every category 1–10
- Declare conflicts before judging
Technical support
Event technical staff who own system access, tooling, the competition portal, and anything that breaks.
- Every technical problem routes here fast
- Coaches never improvise technical answers
- A confident wrong answer costs a team more than "let me find out"
Pick your arena
Same venture. Different game.
The venture framing works in any arena. Tanks is the original. The sports arenas carry the same strategic depth with a game every student already knows.
Ready to run one?
Bring Venture Bot to your students.
We'll help you pick an arena, a level and an AI mode that fit your students and your schedule.