Forgetting to plug in our battery during states for 2 matches and getting our claw tangled in our pneumatic tubing in another at the same competition during Starstruck
This was back when I was in middle school (NBN).
We were testing the robot out and one of our team members decided to turn the robot on and just leave it on the table with the controller…
Yep. The robot drove off of the table. We spent a week fixing up the damage in time for the competition.
Thankfully that has never happened after that one time.
Once I was really sleep deprived and I needed to reverse a sensor value (don’t remember with one, probably an encoder) and I forgot you could just multiply by -1 so I made a function that would convert a number to a string, convert that to a mutable char array, then modify it (creating another array in the process) to either add or remove a - sign, then convert it into a string and then an int.
That is actually amazing. I am simultaneously impressed and ashamed on your behalf. Thanks for sharing that one.
Same. 8th Grade
It was at the US Open when we were in line for skills. Robot fell on our custom flywheel “hood”. Lost all the matches afterward.
How did a power expander get hot enough to melt!?
The battery must have been overcharged or there was too much energy being used by the stuff plugged into the expander. People have melted a cortex before with a battery.
I ran 8 motors off of ports 1-5 for a comp last year and couldn’t figure out why my robot continuously stopped working
Afterward realized it was because I wasn’t using a power expander, added on afterward
A week later my cortex completely died right before a TSA meet
Also my first Starstruck robot was an 18.5" cube of 5x C-Channel and I still somehow passed inspection
wow
Ok i was woried that it might happen with mine due to faulty parts or something
That is also a possibility. You never know when it comes to VEX parts and batteries.
That’s very unfortunate, but I hope you learned to male extras of any important polycarbonate pieces. It’s not what happens to you, but what you learn, that really matters now. 
My old team did a year in review video, which has most of the stupidest stuff that happened that year. Its pure gold. https://www.youtu.be/qManlvRfUsY
I uploaded the wrong program to my robot, so when I wanted it to go forward, it spun around. When I tried to lift mogo, I drove backward. That was a fun match.
That was actually hilarious. Thanks for sharing!
We were using a back up brain and forgot to download the code.
Yesterday at a competition I accidently reversed the left side of my drive so i couldn’t use the mogo lift and I had to turn to get the robot to move straight… I was also facing two good robots. Needless to say I lost 
I do not have any affiliations with the creators of this video, but I thought it was really funny and well-made
not my personal story, but I believe its worth sharing.
so last year we had 3 experienced teams. and there was some friendly competition between us.
so there was this one tournament, my team had already qualified, so I skipped the tourney to focus on school. I assigned two very inexperienced builders to replace the c-channel on our fork and left. when they replaced the C-Channel the folding mechanism didn’t work the same way and our robot ended up being 24 inches long. my teammate somehow managed to pass through inspection and completed his qualifying games without any problems. in eliminations, our X team lost to our A team due to their alliance mixing up code between robots. on the other semi’s my team (B) won and ended up in the finals, and faced off against our A team. this was when someone realized that our bot was (slightly :P) oversized, they measured and we obviously failed. so, 2 mins before the finals, our team was forced to fix our size issue, the only solution my team had was to bend the forks in, this rendered our bot useless, our A team won the 2v1. and that is how our A team won a tournament.
Personal story: in my first month of doing vex, I built a flywheel, I knew that 1:1 wheels wouldn’t spin fast enough so I swapped it for high speeds, I was very confused about why I was unable to launch the ball using that ratio
At one of our most recent competitions, our match was in the middle of autonomous when the opposite alliance was pointing at our controller and mouthing something. My alliance wasn’t sure until after they came over to us and told us our robot/controller was off. Every match we watched our attended always consisted of the MC warning people to make sure their bots and controllers are on.