We were standing in the back of a packed gymnasium at the California Region 4 Middle School Championship when they called the Excellence Award. Four boys froze, then turned to look at each other, then erupted. Helmets off, headsets dropped, hugs all around. The parents behind us were crying.
Excellence isn’t a regular trophy. In VEX, it’s the highest honor a team can earn at any event β recognition not just for the robot’s performance on the field, but for the engineering notebook, the design process, the interviews with judges, the team dynamics, the whole program. It says: this isn’t just a good robot. This is a serious team. And it’s the award that qualified them for the World Championship.
A year ago, I wasn’t sure any of this was going to work.
A Year Ago, I Wrote This Article
Last July, I published a piece about my son’s screen-time spiral and a hunch I was chasing in our garage. The thesis was simple: kids don’t just need less screen time, they need better-structured time. Restrictions weren’t working. What worked β the only thing I’d seen work β was small groups of kids learning hands-on together, with shared problems to solve and real things to build.
I called the experiment ARYF. I didn’t know if it would scale beyond my garage. I asked anyone reading to join in.
A lot has happened since.
What Jonathan Haidt Named
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. I’d recommend it to every parent I know.
Haidt’s argument, in a sentence: between roughly 2010 and 2015, the front-facing camera, the smartphone, and algorithmically tuned social media combined to replace play-based childhood with phone-based childhood β and the mental health collapse that followed isn’t a coincidence. The book makes the case far better than I can.
What surprised me reading it wasn’t his diagnosis. It was that he’d named, with data and frameworks, what I’d been groping at on a Tuesday evening watching my son ping-pong between Zoom and YouTube shorts. Three of his points stuck:
- Play-based vs. phone-based childhood. Kids need embodied, social, hands-on play β and they need it to be unstructured enough to fail at, structured enough to take seriously. A robotics season is exactly that.
- Social deprivation is the root harm. A phone in a kid’s hand is, statistically, an hour they’re not with peers. The opposite of that hour is a build night.
- Antifragility. Kids get stronger by hitting walls β losing matches, broken intakes, code that doesn’t compile, bad interviews, redesigns under deadline. They don’t get stronger by being protected from those things.
Haidt didn’t change what we were doing. He gave me the vocabulary to explain why it works to parents who ask.
What the Team Actually Did
Most articles about competition robotics tell you the score and skip the process. The score is easy: eleven awards across nine events this season. Amaze Award at the VEX Robotics World Championship 2026 (Middle School). Excellence Award at California Region 4. Four Robot Skills Champion titles. #11 in the world in Middle School Robot Skills.
Those numbers are real, and the Inferno page lays them all out: aryf.org/team/24580a-inferno/.
But that’s not the story.
The story is what those four boys β Aiden, Alexander, Brian, and Steven β actually did to get there. Hundreds of build hours across the season. Rewriting autonomous code at midnight before a tournament. Lost matches that became the input to the next design. Mock interviews where they had to explain their engineering process to grownups who were being critical (aka the coach). An engineering notebook that grew thicker than some of their textbooks. Driving practice again and again, until the muscle memory was there.
To be blunt: the potency and immediacy of solving a coding problem in week 14 of a build season still doesn’t beat Roblox in a head-to-head dopamine contest. I wrote that a year ago and it’s still true.
What it does beat is the second hour of Roblox. The third hour. The hour after that. Because when you’re 13 and your team has a tournament Saturday and your intake is broken and your buddy is texting you “did you push the new auton,” you’re not on a phone. You’re at a workbench.
Haidt warned about boys especially β that they’re retreating from real-world challenge into video games and worse. The four boys on this team are, statistically, exactly the kids the book worries about. They’re middle schoolers. They love games. They have phones in their futures.
This year they went to the World Championship.
What Made It Possible
I want to be careful here. The temptation when writing one of these is to make it sound like one founder built something. That’s not what happened.
What happened is that a handful of families showed up. They paid for kits and travel. They drove to tournaments. They mentored. They opened their homes for build sessions. They covered things that ARYF as a nonprofit couldn’t yet cover. They didn’t ask for credit.
ARYF became a registered 501(c)(3) this year, which means the donations and sponsorships that have been keeping the program running now do so on a sustainable footing. The corporate sponsors and individual supporters on our Recognition page β the ones who put their names on the wall β are a fraction of the people who actually made this season happen. Most of the parents are quietly carrying water in ways the page doesn’t show.
The thing I underestimated in the founding article: how much the parents are also a community. The kids built a team. The grownups around them built one too. That second team β the one that doesn’t appear on the field β is what made the first one possible.
What Surprised Me
Three things, after a year.
One: how much the wins mattered psychologically. I started this thinking the wins were a side effect β the byproduct of structured time, social learning, hands-on problem-solving. They are. But watching what happens to a 13-year-old when his team’s name is read at a regional championship: that’s not a side effect. That’s a load-bearing experience. Kids need to win things that were hard.
Two: the boring middle is where it lives. The trophies are visible. The Wednesday-night build sessions are not. Most of the value of this program β the friendships, the work ethic, the unglamorous problem-solving β accumulates in hours that nobody photographs.
Three: it scaled faster than I expected, but only because a few people pushed. A garage experiment becomes a foundation when a small group of adults decides to make it real. There’s no magic to that part. It’s just showing up.
What’s Next
More teams. More programs. A second VEX team is in early planning. The AI literacy track and 3D/design tracks that were sketched a year ago are running and need to grow. The plan is to keep the program model the same β small groups, real projects, hands-on, social β and add capacity carefully.
The constraints are the predictable ones: instructors, kits, space, scholarships for families who can’t pay full freight. None of it is exotic. All of it is fundable.
Join Us (Again)
A year ago, I wrote an article asking people to help me build something. Today I’m writing one asking people to help me scale it.
If you’re a parent who has been having the same fight at home over screens, the program has space for your kid β start at aryf.org/enroll.
If you’re a company looking to put your name on something that’s working with kids in your community, the corporate sponsor page is the door in.
If you have a Wednesday night and an engineering or coding background, mentoring a team is the highest-leverage thing you can do for a kid you don’t know yet. Volunteer here.
And if you can give β to subsidize a student, a kit, a tournament fee β every dollar goes to keeping the seat open for the kid whose family can’t pay for it. Donate.
We didn’t eliminate screens this year. We didn’t try. What we did was offer enough kids enough structured, social, hands-on time that the screens stopped being the center of their week.
The Excellence Award trophy is in a case somewhere. The kids who earned it are already working on next year’s bot.