In April 2026, students from Greenbelt’s Eleanor Roosevelt High School competed at the VEX Robotics World Championship in St. Louis, Missouri. The Eleanor Roosevelt robotics club has participated in the VEX program for 12 years and has sent students to the world championship four times. Two years ago, the Greenbelt Online Blog described one of these prior trips.

This year, the robotics club sent a team of five students to the world championship. Pictured above, the students were Loriel Nickle, Violet Ridge, Meghana Noojipady, John Kelley and Antoni Lin (left to right). This team is called 53E with the “E” distinguishing it from the robotics club’s four other competition teams. This year, the robotics club also formed a non-competing team of middle school students. Taken as a whole, the club is called the Area 53 Alien Raiders.

The Road to the World Championship

The Eleanor Roosevelt students started designing their robots almost a year before their trip to the world championship.

The VEX program revealed the challenge for the 2025–26 school year in a video on the last day of the May 2025 world championship. This year’s challenge requires robots to pick up cubes and place them in four goals. Robots are allowed to push and block other robots but not intentionally damage or disable them.  In this respect, VEX robotics is more like football and less like a demolition-derby car race or the robotic combat in the BattleBots show.

The same day that the 2025-26 challenge was revealed, Eleanor Roosevelt students started brainstorming about how to build a robot to meet that challenge. During the following months, they used the Onshape computer-aided design program to design their entire robot before starting to build it during summer vacation. They took the month of July off, but most of the year, the robotics club held two weekly practices, each three hours long.

During October through February, the robotics club competed at local tournaments in the Baltimore-Washington area. The students repeatedly rebuilt portions of their robots as they thought of better ways to perform this year’s challenge.

During the first part of each two-minute match, a robot must operate autonomously, which means students must write a C++ program to control the robot.  During the rest of a match, a student controls the robot wirelessly using a hand-held game controller. There are always four robots on the field, and they are organized into two alliances of two robots each.

Congressmember Glenn Ivey visits the robotics tournament at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in November 2025.

On November 22, 2025, Eleanor Roosevelt hosted a tournament for 24 Maryland teams in the school’s cafeteria. The annual home game is called the Capital Beltway Challenge. This year, Greenbelt’s representative in the U.S. House of Representatives, Glenn Ivey, visited the event. Above, the photo on the left shows Congressman Ivey learning the rules from Eleanor Roosevelt alumna Terry Thoundayil, now a researcher at the University of Maryland.  The photo on the right shows Ivey watching one of the matches.

In March 2026, all five robots in the Eleanor Roosevelt club competed at the Maryland state championship. On the left side of the photo below, Eleanor Roosevelt’s robot 53E has just placed red cubes in one of two long goals.  Another robot is positioning itself behind the goal in an effort to remove these cubes from the goal.

At the Maryland state championship, robot 53E competes (left) and judges interview the students who built it (right).

At the state championship, some awards were determined by who won matches. Other awards were determined by a group of judges. For example, the judges gave the Design Award to the team that best documented their design process in their engineering notebook and during their interview with the judges. Above right, the photo shows judges interviewing team 53E.

Team 53E won the Design Award at the Maryland state championship, which qualified them to compete at the 2026 world championship.

The World Championship

In April 2026, over 860 teams competed in the 2026 VEX Robotics high school World Championship held in St. Louis. While most teams at the event were from the United States, other teams represented forty countries and several Native American nations. With so many teams in the St. Louis convention center, it took four days of matches to determine which two-team alliance would earn the title of world champion.

The two winning teams would have been identified more quickly if fewer schools had been allowed to competed at the world championship, but the large size of the event was intentional.  The organizers want to inspire students with the possibility of obtaining one of the coveted spots at the world championship.

By making room for over eight hundred teams, the VEX program makes the chance of qualifying for Worlds seem more achievable and worth striving for. That goal inspires students across the country and around the world to work hard designing their robots and trying their best at local competitions throughout the year. Over 6,800 robots competed in local VEX competitions during the 2025-26 academic year.

The panoramic view from the top of the bleachers in the main hall of the 2026 VEX Robotics World Championship in St. Louis. Hover over the image and click the left or right arrows to step through the four frames of the panorama.

The photo above gives a sense of the scale of the 2026 world championship. On the right side of the photo, Eleanor Roosevelt’s team 53E is competing in one their 12 matches at the event. On the left side, team member John Kelley and coach Praveen Noojipady watch from the top of the bleachers.

Behind the bleachers on the left side of the photo, the pit areas of some teams are visible in the distance. Teams repair their robots in their assigned pit. The Eleanor Roosevelt students spent hours visiting other teams in their pits to talk, pick up souvenirs, and sign posters and flags.

One of the reasons students strive to attend the annual world championship is because they want to meet other students that share their enthusiasm for engineering. Team 53E also enjoyed the chance to meet super-star teams, such as the team Snacky Cakes from Ontario, Canada. These teams become famous within the world of high school robotics because of their history of winning major competitions or the widely viewed video reveals that they post online of their robots.

The Eleanor Roosevelt students host VIPs and judges at their pit.

Karen Bogoski, the head coach of the Eleanor Roosevelt robotics club, met a co-founder of the VEX corporation, Bob Mimlich, walking in the convention hall. She invited him to meet the Eleanor Roosevelt students in their pit. In the photo above, Mimlich is seen with the Eleanor Roosevelt students (left). In the photo to the right, judges are giving the Eleanor Roosevelt students a second-round interview because the team was short-listed for the Design Award in one of the ten divisions within this year’s world championship.

Below is a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt students preparing for a match at worlds.  Standing from left to right are Violet Ridge, Meghana Noojipady, and Antony Lin.  Lin is conferring with the driver of the team  with whom they are allied in this match.

Eleanor Roosevelt students prepare for a match at the world championship.

After the second day of the competition, the Eleanor Roosevelt students did some sightseeing including visiting the iconic St. Louis arch. In the photo on the left, the students are Violet Ridge, Loriel Nickle, Meghana Noojipady, Antoni Lin, and John Kelley (front to back). The photo on the right shows Lin, Nickle, Noojipady, and Kelley (left to right).

The team visits the St. Louis Gateway Arch.

The Final Showdown

Once the competition was whittled down to just 32 teams, the final matches were held during a three-hour event in the sports arena next to the St. Louis convention center.

Between the last few matches, the arena show featured roving spotlights, smoke machines, t-shirt guns, and cell-phone polls projected onto giant screens. Several times, songs such as “Golden” from the hit movie KPop Demon Hunters were played at full volume while roving cameras projected onto the arena’s giant screens the audience’s impromptu dance party.

The panoramic photo below was taken during the last match that determined which two teams would be the 2026 world champions.

The final match of the 2026 world championship. Hover over the image and click the left or right arrows to toggle between the left and right panels of the image.

The robotics booster club of Eleanor Roosevelt High School supports the team through volunteering and by raising funds to buy robot-building supplies and to pay event-registration fees. The team is grateful for support from the Neil Peter Foundation, the Maryland Department of Education, and members of the community.

Photo Credits: Praveen Noojipady took the photos of the judges’ interview at the world championship and of the students at the St. Louis arch. Karen Bogoski took the photos at the November 2025 tournament at Eleanor Roosevelt High School. Owen Kelley took the other photos.