photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

From left to right – Zach Wilmes, a 7th grader at Corpus Christi, and Adam Barrett, a 6th grader at Southwest Middle School on Wednesday, April 30, 2025.

In this studio in a Lawrence strip mall, when it’s class time, the students are buzzing, whirring and humming with excitement.

On a typical day, one of them might be learning how to tell whether something is red or blue. Another might be practicing how to thread rings onto a stake or climb a ladder.

The students are robots, and their teachers — a group of Lawrence middle schoolers at the Level Up Robots studio — are so proud of the progress they’ve made.

“Before, we had this robot that could score like one ring every five minutes,” said Dominic March, a seventh grader at West Middle School. Now, he said, they have “this robot that could score (a ring) on the stake in like 30 seconds.”

Soon, these kids and their bots are going to be representing Kansas on a global stage. Two teams from Level Up will soon be off to Dallas for the VEX Robotics World Championship from May 9 through 11, where young engineers compete in challenges that test their building, programming and driving skills.

It’s a first for Level Up, which got its start just a few years ago in 2022.

photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

From left to right – Samuel Bevitt, an 8th grader, and Dominic March, a 7th grader at West Middle School work on their team’s robot.

Studio owner and head coach Tom Walton said the kids have dedicated many hours after school and on weekends to prepare for the competition. He’s seen the effort they’ve put in to design the complicated machines — including times when they had to completely re-engineer them.

The game the robots compete in changes every year. This year, it’s called “High Stakes,” and it involves the robots scoring points by placing colored rings on stakes, positioning mobile goals in designated zones and climbing a central ladder at the end of the match. Strategic placement of goals and effective climbing are key to winning, with additional points awarded if the robot can do it all without the help of its human teachers.

That’s what Dominic and his team, Galvanized Square Steel Trio, are trying to perfect now. As he said, their robot has gotten much faster at picking up the rings and putting them on the stakes.

Now, as teammate Rafe Whitham explains, it has to perfect the process of determining which specific rings to pick up, and that means it has to have a color sensor and the right code to be able to tell the red ones and the blue ones apart.

It’s a task that puts your coding knowledge to the test, but the team has learned a lot about that.

“When you’re first learning the code and stuff, it’s kind of hard, but you’ll get used to it,” said Rafe, who, like Dominic is a seventh grader at West Middle School.

The teams got the chance to compete at the world level with their top performance at the Kansas State VEX V5RC Middle School Championship in Wichita earlier this spring. On March 7, three Level Up teams of three people each — Galvanized Square Steel Trio, Angy Berdz and Donut Police — faced off against 28 other teams from around the state. Donut Police didn’t place, but the other two teams worked together to finish atop the competition in the elimination rounds.

All of the teams worked hard throughout the season, the studio’s staff said, and in a recent newsletter they praised them for their resilience and dedication.

The kids have had two months to enhance their robots, refine their code and sharpen their skills since state. When they show up to the studio, students on the competition teams spend the evening working independently on their robots. Any changes or updates they make are documented in an engineering notebook. These notes don’t just help keep absent teammates informed — they’re also reviewed by the judges during competitions. Even in robotics class, you have to show your work.

Walton said the preparations can be intense, and can involve a lot more than just simple tweaks to a robot’s code.

“They come back to the shop for a couple months, and they can completely destroy the robot and start over and build a new one better, or they can take the robot that they’ve got and they can modify it to improve the way that it works,” Walton said.

“And we’ve had both of those things happen.”

“One of the teams actually built something they didn’t like the first time and it didn’t compete well,” he said. “And then the second time, they came back and they built something that was more competitive, but not as competitive as they wanted it to be. And so they scrapped it and built another one.”

Angy Berdz did a lot of retooling of its robot in these two months. Zach Wilmes, a seventh-grader at Corpus Christi Catholic School, didn’t mince words about their old design.

“Our drivetrain was the worst,” Zach said. “So we made a new drivetrain.”

His team recently finished working on the new version, and he says the improved drivetrain is now his favorite thing about the machine.

“It’s faster, it’s stronger, it’s just better,” he said.

Soon, they’ll put it to the test at worlds — and then, Walton said, a new game will be announced, and the kids will start all over again, building new robots and teaching them new things.

photo by: Josie Heimsoth/Journal-World

The Level Up Robots studio is pictured on Wednesday, April 30, 2025.