We opened the season barely scraping into elimination rounds. Instead of rebuilding once, we iterated constantly during meetings, and long after them.
VEX V5 · Team 98721F · Fremont, CA
RogueRobotics
Seven high schoolers, no mentors whatsoever. We went from the rock-bottom of rankings to a Design Award and a spot at the California State Championship in a single season.
Design Award
Sacramento — notebook & interview
Judges Award
Redwood competition
State qualified
California State Championship
90+ students
Reached through our outreach
Who we are
Student-led means we teach ourselves everything.
Rogue Robotics is a VEX V5 team from Fremont, California with no coach and no mentors. Every mechanism, autonomous routine, budget line, and outreach event is planned and executed by the seven students on the team. And we learned it all ourselves.
We started mid-season as middle schoolers during the 2024-25 High Stakes game, learning the parts, electronics, and strategy entirely on our own. That trial-and-error year is exactly why the 2025-26 Pushback season looked so different.
After winning our first award - robot and award in hand.
The competition
What VEX V5 actually involves
A new game every season. Two-versus-two matches. Robots built, coded, and driven entirely by students.
Watch this season’s game reveal01
Design & build
We brainstorm mechanisms, model them in CAD, prototype in metal, and iterate until the intake, scoring, and drivetrain survive a full tournament day.
02
Programming
Autonomous routines run the robot on its own for the first fifteen seconds of every match. The rest is driver control code tuned around how our driver actually plays.
03
Strategy
Each match pairs us with a different alliance partner. We scout, adapt between rounds, and pick the scoring path that fits both robots on the field.
04
The engineering notebook
Every decision gets documented - sketches, test data, failures, revisions. Judges read it, and it is part of what won us the Design Award in Sacramento.
2025-26 Pushback season
From barely qualifying to the State Championship
The first payoff. Months of iteration put us in the quarter-finals, and the judges recognized the process behind the robot.
We traveled to Sacramento, fought to the semi-finals, and won the Design Award for our engineering notebook, live-judged interview, and overall design process. This earned us our spot at the California State Championship.
Qualified and building toward it, with the VEX World Championship as the goal beyond.
Outreach
Teaching other students to start their own teams
We ran a showcase at Thornton Middle School on how to form and run a self-guided robotics team, then hosted a summer camp where local kids built, programmed, and documented their own robots.
90+ students have come through our events so far.
Support the team
Parts, tools, and registration fees are on us - unless you help.
Sponsorships fund the robot components, competition entries, and outreach events that keep a student-run team competitive.