Team Name

VEX Robotics Competition Discussion VRC
1

We need a team name. Any suggestions?

2

“Any Suggestions” seems to fit.

1 Like
3

Blackstone Valley Regional Vocational Technical High School robotics team

4

“Hey it’s 6916H”

:wink:

5

The Ultraviolet Catastrophe

6

What is your school’s mascot?

7

Our mascot is the ever so frightening, super tough and intimidating

beaver.

8

“Stop defunding us”

9

“Was Drafting”

10

Quiet Riot, Leviathans, Metal Mayhem

11

BeaVerT?

12

Beavexers

13

How about “Beaver Fever”

14

I’ve always thought these words had a cool ring to them:

Inferno
Venom
Horizon
Syzygy
Crypt

Or you could go for a number pun such as “Very Sweet 16” (not sure if that qualifies as in good taste, you might wanna ask in the Q and A if it’s an issue.)

I’ve also seen jokes based on the rules. My robot name is “The Non Functional Decoration” for example.

Lastly, you could just name it after your school, organization, etc. and be boring. :slight_smile:

Good luck!

15

THE DAM

What do you think of that?

16

Here are a few ideas. Some of them are terrible, and nobody would ever use them. But they may give you actual useful ideas for coming up with names you would use.

First, you can look to names in military and aviation. This gets to names like “Screaming Eagles,” for 101st Airborne Division, “Iron Deuce” for the 8th Armored, and one of my favorites “Hell on Wheels” for Patton’s 2nd Armored. There’s interesting name ideas from demonstration teams like “Golden Knights”, the Army’s jump team, and “Blue Angels”, the Navy’s flying demo team.

You can also take inspiration from individual named aircraft like Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose”. Another couple of my favorite examples is “Glacier Girl”, a P-38 that was recovered from 238 feet of ice and returned to flying condition, and Experimental Aircraft Associations B-17, “Aluminum Overcast”

Obviously, you wouldn’t use those names directly, but they could inspire you. “Heck on Wheels” is pretty funny, actually. It sounds so…trying to be more than it really is. Aspirational.

Working with the school nickname is tough, but here’s one idea. A group of regiments from the 101st Airborne picked up the name “Battered Bastards of Bastogne”, which of course you can’t use. But you could do:

Battered Beavers of Bastogne

or just

Battered Beavers

(Though that sounds like something one of the food trucks might be selling right now at the Kentucky Expo Center, because the State Fair is going on.)

I like that many of the military nicknames use “Iron” in them. We don’t use iron in VEX, but we do use steel and aluminum. So I like this:

Aluminum Avengers

To which my daughter Ellen (MS 32545A, Glendale Technicals or G-Techs) suggested:

Chromium Crushers

Okay, we don’t use any chromium. But not bad.

Ellen also suggested naming a team with enigmatic color names. Here are her suggestions:

Dayglow Black
Midnight Yellow
Scarlet Green
Sunflower Purple
Forest Orange
Firetruck Blue

A couple of those sound good when I think about the emcee announcing them: “Dayglow Black is making a move on Blue’s last mobile goal!”

Another suggestion for esoteric team or robot names comes from the Culture novels of Iain Banks. The Culture is a fictional universe in which each spacecraft is constructed with a controlling Artificial Intelligence. After the intelligence is placed in the ship it choses its own name.

Elon Musk chose to honor Iain Banks by naming the SpaceX autonomous drone ships (the unmanned landing barges) with names from the novel The Player of Games. The names are:

**Just Read The Instructions
Of Course I still Love you
**
The Culture novels are filled with great ship names. Here are a few other ship names that I like:

Rapid Random Response Unit
Rubric of Ruin
I Blame the Parents
What Are The Civilian Applications?
Ultimate Ship The Second
Synchronize Your Dogmas
Gunboat Diplomat

And here’s a brief list of names we made up in the same style as the names from The Culture novels:

Hostile Intent
Some Assembly Required
Observe From Distance
Quantum Entanglement
All Thrust and No Heading
Vector Addition
Quaternion Conundrum

Another source of inspiration for whimsical names in the Culture vein is phrases from the government-mandated labelling on consumer fireworks.

Light Fuse And Retire or
LFAR; Light Fuse And Retire
Emits Showers of Sparks or just
Emits Sparks

Here are a couple of questionable ones; I assure you this is typical fireworks labelling:

**
Not Safe To Hold in Hand
Shoots Flaming Balls
**

Here’s a series of names with various bits of inspiration:

R.T.G.M.; Read the Game Manual
R.O.T.S.; Robots of Typical Size (That’s a nod to Princess Bride.)
Kobayashi Maru (okay, I don’t have to tell you guys, right?)
Paradigm Shifters
Robotic Maneuvers
Automated Mayhem
Axle Twisters
Team Twitch Alpha (If you’re depending on a really responsive driver.)
‘Bots of Luck
C3R: Constrained, Conscripted, and Confused Robotics
CypherPunk Pirates

Here are a couple of derisive names that are handy putdowns for your opponents, so long as it’s a friendly competition:

Overweight and Undergunned
Low Fidelity Laggards
Team Tango Uniform
German Aesthetic; Italian Efficiency

And finally, a couple of silly names suggested to me not for a team, but for a robot:

Metal Bob Robo-Pants
Robo McRobotFace

Sigh. See? This is why you don’t ask people for names.

17

Ours was (is) based off of a long standing joke, that was turned into an acronym. Acronyms tend to stick out nicely in team name lists, drawing people’s eyes to your number, potentially helping you get picked. (Or just making it obvious that you’re in last place…) Anyways many teams came up to ask us what ours meant last year, which may have lead to other conversations and helped us get alliances. Who knows.

Anyways here are some suggestions:
W.B.I.L.N. (We built it last night)
Cone Chaos
The Flailing Four-Bars
Beaver Bashers

18

The first year for our team the students came up with ID10T5 but after the first year, the higher ups at the organization did not appreciate self-deprecating humor and made us change it.

All of the students still wish they could use that name and one of the guys still wears his T-shirt to tournaments sometimes.

19

I really like that one.

Ironically, my experience with European trains included a severely-late Swiss train. Go figure.

20

If you are looking for a “serious” sounding name, USAF squads and aircraft are absolutely the way to get inspiration. Also, NASA stuff. Like “The Eagle has Landed”.

But, maybe you are looking for something else…

What about references to tv shows, books, and movies? For instance: “Don’t Even Blink” is the ultimate Doctor Who inspired team name. Sounds pretty menacing, and you’d have to be a proper nerd to get the reference since its not too obvious unless you’ve watched the show. For Star Wars, “We Aren’t the Droids You’re Looking For” (might be too long IDK). You get the idea.

Or you could do something less serious, I liked…