History

The idea for a BEST competition originated several years ago when two Texas Instruments engineers, Ted Mahler and Steve Marum, were serving as guides for Engineering Day at their company site in Sherman, TX. Together with a group of high school students, they watched a video of freshmen building a robot in Woody Flowers' class at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The high school students were so interested that Ted and Steve said, "Why don't we do this?"

After correspondence with MIT, the idea was presented to TI management. With enthusiastic approval from Dwain Chaffin, then general purpose logic manager at Sherman, the North Texas BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology) was born. After learning that a San Antonio group had formed a similar program, the two sites decided to meet the next year for a state playoff. In 1995, Texas BEST became an annual event sponsored by Texas Instruments and Texas A&M University.

In 1993, BEST began with one site, North Texas, and its 14 schools and 221 students. In 2002, BEST was organized at 19 sites (called hubs) in Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, and involved more than 450 teams and thousands of students. The 60 top-placing teams from the hubs advanced to the Texas BEST Championship.

In 2003, a new playoff location - South's BEST - was added to the BEST family. The South's BEST is based at Auburn University in Alabama.

In 2004, the Texas BEST regional competition moved from A&M University to Southern Methodist University. Texas BEST moved again to Texas Tech University in 2006.

Texas BEST Games