Record Field in Veszprém: 35 Teams at World Robot Olympiad Regional Round Hosted by CODE CREATOR

With 35 competing teams against 16 in 2025, the event recorded a growth of roughly 118.75 per cent — the largest year-on-year increase of any Hungarian regional round to date.

This was the first time the regional round took place at CODE Center of Digital Experiences, a purpose-built digital learning and maker facility in Veszprém. The venue proved a fitting match for the 2026 WRO season theme, Robots Meet Culture, which asks young people to explore how robotics can help shape, protect and share art, heritage and cultural identity. For a city that held the European Capital of Culture title in 2023, the pairing of cultural heritage and engineering was more than symbolic: teams had to solve technically demanding missions while working within a cultural frame of reference.

Teams traveled to Veszprém from thirteen Hungarian municipalities — among them Budapest, Győr, Debrecen, Biatorbágy, Felcsút, Dunaharaszti, Lenti, Devecser, Tüskevár, Csopak, Balatonfüred, Balatonalmádi and Veszprém itself — making the round one of the most geographically diverse in the national series.

Competition took place in the RoboMission category across all three WRO age groups: Elementary (8–12 years), Junior (11–15 years) and Senior (14–19 years). Teams of two to three students, supported by an adult coach, designed, built and programed autonomous robots to complete the season's mission on a standard competition field, with repeated rounds under time pressure. Beyond technical precision, the tasks called for iterative problem solving, debugging under stress and creative interpretation of the cultural theme.

Ákos Fekete, lead instructor of CODE CREATOR Digital Makerspace, opened the competition day and welcomed participants, coaches and families.

Péter Tamás Szilasi, Director of Digital Educational Science, Development and International Affairs at Edutus University and project lead for WRO Hungary, described the olympiad as more than a competition — a community and knowledge platform where creativity, innovation and collaboration meet, and, in his words, "where the professionals of the future are born."

The three category winners in Veszprém were ZűrZsenik (Budapest) in the Elementary, Iron Storm (Veszprém) in the Junior and Storms RMS (Biatorbágy) in the Senior categories.

Eight teams qualified from the regional round for the Hungarian National Final: ZűrZsenik (Budapest), RoboRaptors (Csopak), Logic Legends (Csopak), Motoros Ördögök (Veszprém), Iron Storm (Veszprém), Eötvös Balatonfüred (Balatonfüred), AUMOVIO LEGO-MOVIO (Veszprém) and Storms RMS (Biatorbágy).

Awards were presented by Zoltán Mihály Fenyvesi, Director of Balatonfüred School District Centre; Péter Kismődi, Head of the Development Center at AUMOVIO Hungary Kft.; Zsuzsanna Tóthné Óbányai, Head of AUMOVIO Hungary Robotics Mentoring Program; Ákos Fekete (CODE CREATOR); Kornél Jámbor, professional lead of WRO Hungary and head judge of the RoboMission category; and Péter Tamás Szilasi (Edutus University). As a cooperating partner of WRO Hungary, AUMOVIO Hungary Kft. presented additional gifts to the best-performing teams.

Closing the ceremony, Péter Kismődi highlighted the value of the competition as an entry point for young people interested in programing and engineering careers, and welcomed the steady year-on-year expansion of the WRO Hungary community.

For CODE CREATOR, the regional round is the visible end of a continuous program rather than a stand-alone event. The makerspace runs WRO competition preparation clubs throughout the school year, meeting weekly for 90-minute sessions in two age groups aligned with the official WRO categories, Elementary (8–12) and Junior (11–15).

The clubs are built around four strands of engineering practice. Participants design and build LEGO-based robots for a specific mission, working with gear ratios, drivetrains and sensor placement rather than following instructions. They program in Pybricks, a Python-based text environment, instead of block-based tools alone — decomposing a problem into instructions and reasoning about program flow in real code. They test, measure and debug systematically, treating failure as data. And they work in teams, dividing tasks and making decisions collectively, like in a professional development team.

No prior programing experience is required to join; the entry conditions are persistence, willingness to collaborate and confident reading, since the programing environment is text-based. The pathway is explicit: from the weekly club through the regional round and the national final to international competition — the route several of the teams competing in Veszprém are now following.

The road ahead

The qualifying teams continue to the National Final on 26–27 June 2026, from where the strongest teams can go on to represent Hungary internationally: at the WRO Open Championship Europe in Zagreb, 13–16 October 2026, and at the WRO International Final in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 8–10 December 2026.

The World Robot Olympiad has run since 2004 and is today one of the world's largest educational robotics competitions, with tens of thousands of teams from more than 90 countries each season. In Hungary, the competition has been organized by Edutus University since 2014. Responding to growing demand, the 2026 season expanded from seven to nine regional rounds, adding Győr and Pécs as new host cities; the round following Veszprém was held in Tatabánya on 22 April 2026.

Growth is visible nationally as well: the Hungarian RoboMission field grew from 148 teams in 2025 to 220 in 2026, while Future Innovators expanded from 26 to 41 teams — an increase of close to 50 per cent overall.