Lakeside Robotics Club
Grew the club's funding from $200 to $10,000, secured a permanent build space, recruited the school's first gender-balanced team, and took it to back-to-back state championships. VEX team 10955M won the VRC World Championship Energy Award.
- Leadership
- VEX
- Engineering
- Fundraising
Four years of building a high-school robotics program into something that outlives the people who started it.
The numbers
| Funding | $200 → $10,000 |
| Build space | None → a permanent dedicated space |
| Team composition | The school’s first gender-balanced team |
| Competition | Back-to-back state championships |
| World Championship | Energy Award, VEX team 10955M |
Funding and space
A robotics club with $200 is a club that borrows a classroom and builds with what it can scrounge. The two things that changed that were money and a room, in that order — and the room was harder.
A permanent build space is what makes a robotics program continuous. Without one, every season starts by finding somewhere to work and ends by packing everything away; nothing accumulates. With one, tools, parts, and half-finished mechanisms stay where they are, and a new member can walk in and see what the club actually is.
The first gender-balanced team
Recruiting Lakeside’s first gender-balanced robotics team was a deliberate effort, not an accident of who turned up. It’s the outcome I’m most proud of from those four years, because unlike a trophy it changes who thinks the room is for them.
VRC World Championship — Energy Award
Team 10955M took the Energy Award at the VEX Robotics World Championship, which recognizes “outstanding enthusiasm and excitement at the event.” Not an engineering award — a culture one. Given what we’d spent four years building, that’s the one that fit.
Engineering notebook
The 2023/24 engineering notebook documents a full season’s design process — iterations, decisions, and the reasoning behind them.