From Bengaluru to the Philippines:
Our WRO Asia Pacific 2025 Journey

In late April 2025, four teams from Brick Masters Bengaluru boarded a flight to the Philippines — 12 students, ages 9 to 15, carrying hand-built robots, months of training, and the quiet confidence that only comes from knowing you've earned your place on the stage. This is the story of how they got there — and what they brought back.

The Road to Qualification

The World Robot Olympiad (WRO) Asia Pacific Finals is not a tournament you register for. You win your way in. Our journey began in October 2024 at the WRO India Nationals qualifier, where teams from across the country compete for one of a handful of berths to the continental stage.

Four Brick Masters teams entered the Nationals that year — and all four qualified. That result still surprises us, if we're honest. We'd hoped for two. Getting all four through was the moment we knew this group of students was genuinely exceptional.

""The moment all four teams read their names on the qualification board — the room went absolutely silent for a second, then completely erupted. I've coached for nine years. I've never seen anything like it.""

— Rajan Mehta, Head Coach

The qualifying teams were Fast n Furious AIR #4 and Curiosity AIR #5 in the Regular Category (ages 10–15), alongside two teams in the Junior category (ages 9–12). Combined, they represented 12 students from our Indiranagar centre — some of whom had been building with LEGO bricks for less than eighteen months.

The Machine Behind the Mission

Between November and March, the four teams trained six days a week. The WRO 2025 theme — Earth's Harvests — challenged teams to build autonomous robots that could identify, sort, and transport simulated crop modules across a colour-coded field. The scoring was ruthless: every missed pickup, every wrong delivery zone, every second over the 2-minute clock deducted points.

Fast n Furious AIR #4 built a differential-drive robot using the LEGO SPIKE Prime set, with a custom-coded colour sensor array that could distinguish between three crop types in under 80 milliseconds. The team spent 14 iterations on the gripper mechanism alone — a number they weren't shy about announcing to judges during the technical interview.

Curiosity AIR #5 took a different approach: a lighter, faster chassis optimised for field coverage, sacrificing raw pickup precision for speed and consistency under pressure. Their strategy was deliberate — target the "easy" placements fast and reliably rather than chase the high-value zones and risk a zero-score run.

Manila: The Stage

The WRO Asia Pacific 2025 Finals were held at the SMX Convention Centre in Mandaluyong City, Metro Manila — a venue that hosts events for 10,000 people. For most of our students, it was their first time outside India. For all of them, it was their first time competing against the continent's best.

The scale of it was immediately apparent. Over 200 teams from 14 countries filled the main hall. Japan, South Korea, and China had sent teams that had been training under full-time coaching programmes for over a year. The competition floor looked like a science fiction movie set — robots of every shape, colour, and strategy whirring into motion every few minutes as heat after heat played out.

""I walked in thinking I was going to be nervous. Then I saw our robot do its first run on the competition field and I just thought — we built that. We actually built that.""

— Meera, Fast n Furious AIR #4, Age 14

Fast n Furious AIR #4 completed their Round 1 run with a score of 215 points out of a possible 280 — placing them 4th in their preliminary group. Curiosity AIR #5 scored 198, placing 6th in theirs. Both teams advanced to the knockout rounds, which in a field of this quality was itself an achievement few expected from first-time continental competitors.

What the Scores Don't Show

In the knockout rounds, Curiosity AIR #5 suffered a mechanical failure in their first heat — a pin in the chassis had worked loose during transport. They finished with a 90-point run that eliminated them from medal contention. Fast n Furious AIR #4 made it to the top-16 before being edged out by a Korean team that eventually went on to win bronze.

Neither team came home with a medal. What they came home with was something harder to quantify: the lived experience of building something from nothing, bringing it to the highest stage they'd ever stood on, and performing with composure under conditions that would have broken most adults.

Coming Home

The flight back to Bengaluru was quieter than the flight out. Not a sad quiet — more the kind that settles in when a big thing is over and you're still processing what just happened. A few students slept. Most stared out the window.

One student — Aryan, 12, from the Junior category team — spent the whole flight back writing notes on what he wanted to change about their robot for next year. That, more than any score or ranking, is what a competition does. It gives you a clear picture of the gap between where you are and where you want to be — and it makes that gap feel exciting rather than discouraging.

""My daughter came back different. She didn't come back upset about the mechanical failure — she came back with a notebook full of ideas for how to fix it. That's what Brick Masters gave her.""

— Priya S., Parent of Curiosity AIR #5 team member

We're already registered for WRO 2025–26. Training for the national qualifier resumes in June. The four teams that went to Manila are already recruiting — looking for one or two more members who want to be part of something that's only going to get bigger from here.

If your child is between 7 and 15 and has ever looked at a machine and wondered how it works — we'd like to meet them.