From April 21 through April 30, the America’s Center Convention Complex will host the VEX Robotics World Championship, and if you haven’t been paying attention to competitive robotics, this is your chance to start.

More than 1,800 teams from over 50 countries will bring robots they designed and built themselves to compete in a game that changes every year. This year’s game involves robots autonomously navigating a field, stacking rings, and climbing structures — things that sound simple until you watch a 15-year-old’s machine do them faster and more precisely than you could by hand. The teams range from middle school students to college competitors. Some of them have been working on their robots for eight months.

City Museum — which is essentially what happens when you give an artist unlimited salvaged materials and no restrictions — has already installed a preview exhibit called Robot Renaissance, featuring robots built from everyday objects by St. Louis artists Bill Christman and Dave Rudis. The robots are described as “peculiar,” which from City Museum is high praise.

St. Louis has been hosting major events with more confidence lately — the Oddities and Curiosities Expo in May, the robotics championship in April. The city that once staged the Olympics alongside a World’s Fair in the same year still has a taste for the ambitious and the strange.

The robots don’t care about any of that. They just want to climb the structure faster than the other robot. That’s enough.