February 19, 2026
All students at MILTON spend time in Exploratory class, where they develop engineering, programming, and design thinking skills in the Design Lab. But some students are expanding upon this by spending their time after school and on weekends on the Robotics team.
MILTON’s Robotics program started as an offering for middle school students. The middle school Robotics team spends the first half of the year preparing for the First Lego League Robotics tournament in December. They meet twice a week to build custom robots that will compete against other schools’ teams.
The middle school tournament, where 12-20 schools gather together for a full day of competition, is a highlight of the year. “The competitions are hectic and a lot of fun,” said Cal Newport, one of the Robotics coaches. “At the core of the competition is the robot game, in which teams have two minutes to run their custom robot on a board containing a collection of challenges worth varied points. The goal is to get as many points as possible during the allotted time by deploying your robot from its homebase to complete challenges.”
At the tournament, teams also have to formally present their robot design, and complete and present a separate innovation challenge. First Lego League also emphasizes “coopetition” — cooperation through competition — and assesses participants’ teamwork and sportsmanship.
After the December tournament, the middle school team continues to meet once a week to focus on independent projects that further develop Robotics and programming skills. This both prepares the students for the next year of competition and allows them to develop real world problem solving skills.
In competition, getting every point is incredibly difficult, but possible. The robot must lift and hold items of various shapes and sizes, transport them, place them in specific locations, push levers, open compartments with lids of various sizes and remove items from them, launch projectiles, run various contraptions, and more—all with enough precision to not damage the fragile Lego structures the course is built with. This requires immense specificity in how a robot is built and all of the different components it needs to have. Click here to see an example of a robot earning every possible point on the course from this year.
Several years ago, Cal and fellow MILTON parent Adam Berman had the idea to start an elementary school Robotics club as well. This was partially a way to garner interest early and feed into the middle school competition team, but it was also because they knew many students—including their own children—who they thought would like to participate.
The elementary school team meets once a week and works on projects that take 2-3 weeks to complete. With each project, they develop new coding and programming skills and build a variety of robots using motors, sensors, lights, and other features. This creates a basis to use for more advanced projects in middle school. When each project is complete, students mark their achievement with either a competition or a demonstration, which parents often attend.
This year, Adam and Cal also took over coaching the middle school team. “When Adam and I took over the middle school team this year, we got the chance to coach students who we had worked with for three previous years in the elementary program,” Cal said. “It was great to see how far they had come — we were quite proud.”
Cal credits the advanced level of the middle school team in part to students who have been building their skills and knowledge since their time on the elementary school team. This year, other coaches even expressed admiration for how sophisticated MILTON’s robots were—and Cal and Adam were able to proudly share the trajectory they developed, where students collaborate, learn, and grow together as engineers for years.
We are very proud of our students for representing the STEM excellence at MILTON each year—and having fun while doing it!
