Saratoga High School’s robotics teams earned top honors across regional, national, and world championship competitions during the 2025-26 season through the FIRST Robotics and VEX Robotics programs. The school’s Mechanical Science and Engineering Team competed across multiple FIRST formats, while its VEX program qualified several teams for national and international finals. The results reflect a sustained competitive STEM and engineering program now spanning multiple years of championship-level participation.
In the FIRST Robotics Competition, the MSET Fish team competed in the inaugural season of FIRST California’s new district format and earned the District Engineering Inspiration Award, sponsored by SpaceX, at the San Francisco district event. The award recognizes teams advancing engineering and STEM education through community outreach and advocacy. In the FIRST Tech Challenge DECODE game, the MSET CuttleFish team advanced to the NorCal Regional Championship, seeded third out of 32 qualifying teams and securing the program’s fifth World Championship appearance since 2019.
The VEX Robotics program qualified four teams for the 2026 U.S. Open VEX Robotics Championship in Iowa and advanced three teams to the VEX Robotics World Championship in St. Louis. Teams V and X earned Division Champion titles and reached the grand finals, with Team V capturing the U.S. Open Tournament Champion title after winning two of three championship matches. At the World Championship, Team V ranked first after winning 12 of 13 qualification matches before advancing to the division semifinals.
Competitive robotics programs such as FIRST and VEX function as significant pipelines for engineering and technical talent, exposing students to mechanical design, programming, and systems integration well before university. As demand for robotics and automation expertise grows across industry, sustained performance at the championship level, combined with year-round STEM outreach, illustrates how secondary education programs contribute to the longer-term workforce that the robotics and automation sectors increasingly depend on.
