BEST (Boosting Engineering Science and Technology) is a robotics competition each fall for middle and high school students.

Teams must work quickly—in six weeks from September to October—to build a unique robot for a specified task, usually involving teamwork and multiple human operators.

There are twenty-eight hub competitions, primarily in the South- Eastern United States, though BEST is spreading nationwide. The competition culminates in five large regional events. Team Purple Haze participates in Capitol BEST and frequently goes on to Texas BEST.

BEST strives to get young people involved not only in the design and manufacture of machines, but also in the technical writing, documentation, and promotion behind the machine, through special awards for such things as notebooks and oral presentations. Essentially, BEST helps to train the next generation of engineering teams.