Cal High’s Robotics Club is competing for high-stakes trophies while establishing foundational learning, successfully integrating its mentoring philosophy through the competitive yet supportive Cubs program. 

Cubs is a student-run robotics mentorship program where club officers help rookie robotics students build robots using VEX components. VEX Robotics, a for-profit corporation, sells these educational parts and systems. 

The program culminated on Dec. 6 with its end of semester internal competition. Club officers volunteered to organize the entire event, including setting up the outdoor field, helping teams with last minute fixes, and judging engineering notebooks where students documented the work they put into their robots. 

Teams competed in alliances of two by scoring 3D-printed rings on mobile goals, driving these goals to their side of the field, and balancing their robots on a central tipping platform. 

“It was very fun. Seeing the different bot designs was quite interesting,” junior Rizal Arturo Pacheco said. “I noticed that teams that worked together performed well in the competition compared to teams that just did their own thing.” 

The competition was a result of months of work by students, who met weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays to bring their robots to completion. But with a total of eight teams, some felt that supplies were hard to come by. 

“The hardest part of building the robot would be the lack of materials due to the draconic nature of the competition, hoarding parts even if we may never use them,” said senior Alanzo Pellatiro, a first year robotics student participating in the Cubs program. 

Club officers mentor and aid students throughout the year as well. The curriculum is intentionally structured in ascending order of complexity, ensuring beginners are not overwhelmed. 

Cubs begin with a basic introduction to hardware and software before progressing to hands-on techniques. Students are taught the mechanics of putting VEX parts together, ensuring rotational movement and utilizing gears to create fully functional robots. 

While the competition at the end of the semester provides a goal for students to work toward, the club leadership emphasizes that the primary objective of the program itself is education.

“The most important skill is project management and how to work together with others on a complex project that’s probably too big for one person,” club adviser and engineering teacher John Reed said.

Reed, who has been advising the club since 2011, stressed that non-technical skills such as dealing with deadlines and intermediate milestones are the most critical takeaways.

The day-to-day success of the program is driven entirely by student leadership. Club president Sushrut Pola and lead Cubs coordinator Avery Ngo develop and direct the weekly sessions with the help of other mentors. The two seniors joined the club as freshmen and have slowly grown into their leadership roles.

Ngo highlighted that the true measure of success is the development of critical thinking, not the score they receive at the end-of-semester competition. 

“Success for us looks like when the Cubs come out of this program learning way more than they knew coming in,” Ngo said. 

Ngo said the program helps new students develop skills in critical thinking, engineering design process, and problem solving.

Along with the Cubs program, the club supports two independent competition teams, 1516A and 1516X that participate in the VEX Robotics Competition. Both teams recruit members from the Cubs program and compete in statewide VEX competitions. 

Cal’s teams have qualified for the state championships multiple times in the past five years, with 1516X competing most recently in March 2025 as a part of last year’s season. Most competition team members mentor the cubs program, creating a full cycle that upholds the club’s legacy.

Looking ahead, Pola affirmed that the confidence students gain from the competition translates directly to greater retention and engagement with advanced concepts in both future Cubs events and competitive teams, but the long-term vision aims higher. 

“The main thing is to give them more exposure to engineering, and give them more exposure to robotics in the field,” Pola said. “[We want to] just give them enough exposure [so] that they might consider taking it on as a career in the future.”