From the RAT Race to the RAT Foundation: ten years of robots

People sometimes ask about the name. It goes back to 2015, when Rob Parker founded an annual robotics, automation and technology competition at Charter International School in Bangkok and called it the RAT Race. The name of the foundation is a nod to that original game.

You don't have to take our word for it — Charter published their own video of the 2018 Rat Race, and Charter teams still compete at RAT events today, a decade on.

From there the events grew: from 2018 the same team was hosting and running the VEX events at St Andrews International School Bangkok — eight years of qualifiers, scrimmages and tournaments — and taking teams to compete at events like Thailand's 2019 VRC Nationals at NIST. Today the RAT Foundation runs sanctioned VEX qualifiers, Signature Events, the Thailand Cup, and our own platform-agnostic RAT Open — and in early 2026, after two years of doing this work as RAT, the foundation was formally recognised by the Thai Government as an official education charity.

The full timeline — with every era linked to its official listing or published results — is on our history page.