Maria Brinza
Robotics and Engineering Teacher
Collaborate, Code, Compete: The Growing World of Robotics at Lab
During the 2024–2025 school year, Lab fielded a Middle School competitive robotics team that had great success in their first year at local VEX Robotics competitions. These open-ended robotics and research challenges give team members the opportunity to develop problem solving and teamwork skills. This school year, there are multiple competitive robotics teams across the Middle and Upper Schools.
The Lab School of Washington has a robust selection of extracurricular activities available for our students: the athletic program currently includes 33 teams across ten sports and performing arts theatrical and musical productions are staged for students of all ages throughout the year. New to Lab’s extracurricular programming last year was the competitive Middle School Robotics Team, led by Robotics and Engineering Teacher Maria Brinza. Competing in the VEX IQ Robotics League, participants assemble robots to complete a series of challenges against and alongside other teams. Points earned during the matches determine team rankings.
Lab’s inaugural team of eighth graders gave themselves the name Krispy Chicken and made a splash in their first season, winning several awards for their designs and earning a number one ranking in DC in the Skills Challenge which placed them in the top 15% of teams around the world.
The program emphasizes student leadership. “I don’t build the robots,” Ms. Brinza notes. “I’m a mentor. The kids do the building, coding, testing, and strategy. They set their own goals – some very ambitious – but they also have short term goals including ‘each competition we get better.’” Lab Freshman Hank Nathanson ’29 was a member of Krispy Chicken
and would recommend joining a competitive team to anyone who is interested in robotics. “It really helps to join a team, especially one that knows what they are doing,” he says. “It’s great for starting out then by the end of the season, we were all so fast and efficient in how we could get stuff built.” The competitions are held at various schools in the area and are divided into the main challenge matches and skills challenges that reward the teams with the best driving or coding abilities. Each year, the main challenge teams take on changes: for the 2024–25 season, the main challenge involved two teams being paired together to pass balls between their robots and score shots through goals around the arena. This year’s challenge is a mix and match game in which teams stack differently colored game elements and place them into goals. Points are awarded based on the number of pieces stacked, how many colors are included, and whether stacks match the color of the goal.
Team members take on different roles – drivers, coders, or builders – and because of the collaboration between teams, they learn far more than engineering. “To succeed in the competitions, you have to be collaborative, you have to use
positive language, and you have to be supportive of your alliance partner,” explains Ms. Brinza. “Conduct and sportsmanship are so important in VEX IQ. Most of the violations you can get are conduct based, and for bad sportsmanship they can bump you out of a match, out of a tournament, or the whole season. The league encourages honesty, integrity, collaboration, kindness, respect – all the virtues that Lab likes to promote as well.”
Unlike many of the other afterschool robotics clubs that compete, Lab’s robotics team meets as part of a class in addition to their practices before or after school. This gave the team the opportunity to build four different robots instead of just one. Starting with the basic design that VEX provides, the team was able to iterate on their original designs and drew inspiration from online research and other teams around the world. heir innovative designs won them the Create Award out of the fifty teams competing at one Virginia tournament and the Design Award in the DC League. “It was impressive,” says Ms. Brinza. “Their robot was just original.”
Interest has surged in the program after the initial season. During the2025–2026 school year, there are enough students for two Middle School class periods of competitive teams, with a pipeline of potential recruits in the Introduction to Robotics classes. Meanwhile, past members of the Krispy Chicken team are now in Lab’s Upper School and ready to take their VEX competition to the next level. “Ms. Brinza took the lead on getting us into the VEX IQ League and really implementing the vision that we had for starting a robotics competition team,” says Daniel Hartmann, Lab’s Director of Education Technology and Upper School Engineering and Robotics Teacher. “Last year, we used all her experience getting it treated as a sport to create a plan for what an Upper School team would look like, including moving from VEX IQ into VEX V5. The students have great building and design knowledge, but these challenges require a great deal more coding than they have previously used, so we will be focusing on developing those skills further in class.”
Now on the Upper School team, Hank is looking forward to this upgrade and the future of Lab’s competitive robotics teams. “I’m really excited to get started with V5 because it’s a lot more challenging. For one thing, the robots are all metal and you need to actually use a drill to screw everything in – this is more like real world engineering. I just really like building stuff.” Asked to pass along any pieces of wisdom to the younger students who would be joining the new robotics teams, Hank put it simply: “Don’t second guess yourself. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work – you can always take it apart and start over.”
