‘Shared camaraderie.’ Pines middle school teams eye world robotics championships
When Dianna Salcedo-Machado first walked into her robotics classroom as a rookie teacher at Pembroke Pines Charter Middle School in 2022, she was shocked.
Of the 30 kids enrolled in her course, only two were girls. Both were their team’s respective notebook writers, tasked with logging the engineering process as opposed to designing themselves.
“I was, like, ‘Unacceptable, unacceptable,’” Salcedo-Machado remembered thinking. “No, we are so much more than that.”
Four years later, the school’s robotics programs now sports three all-girls teams, one of which has qualified for this year’s VEX IQ’s Regional Championship, one of the largest competitions of its kind worldwide.
They’re joined by a PPCMS all-boys robotics team that also qualified and is gunning for the same goal: represent Broward County middle schoolers on a global stage.
But possibly standing between both groups and international recognition are steep fees and a thin budget.
“We compete in about 34 or 36 competitions a year. ... All that adds up, materials that we have to replace, so it’s very expensive,” Salcedo-Machado told the Pembroke Pines News. “Money is always a constraint. ... Things are tight everywhere, our budget gets smaller and smaller each year.”
‘Going there to experience’
Before the Machado Minions and the Astrocheeses — Salcedo-Machado’s qualifying teams — aim for world domination, they’ll have to win big at the regional championships in Miami Springs on Sunday, March 8.
Vex Robotics competitions have middle schoolers use plastic-based materials, but require students apply the same engineering processes as metal-based robotics, Salcedo-Machado says.
Teams must design, build and program a robot, or make modifications to a default “Hero Bot” that can meet the objectives of each season’s “game.”
This year’s challenge, which the Machado Minions and Astrocheeses have worked on since October, is called “Mix & Match” and consists of two teams stacking and placing colored beams and pins into “goals” across a 6-foot-by-8-foot “field.”
Students also have to log the evolution of their bot in an “engineering notebook” and pass an interview to prove they have a deep understanding of the ins and outs of their design.
Both teams competed in roughly five local competitions, with the all-girls Astrocheeses qualifying for regionals by winning an “Innovate Award” for using cutting-edge strategies in their robot build. The all-boys Machado Minions qualifyed via their “skills” points, meaning their robot scored high in “Mix & Match.”
The 2026 VEX Robotics World Championship — held April 21-30 in St. Louis — will follow a similar format, says Salcedo-Machado, but the impact it leaves on students is unparalleled.
“(Salcedo-Machado) gave me the chance to go into (robotics) last year ... and I kind of got thrown into the fire. It taught me how to be a leader,” said eighth-grader Landon Garro, the Machado Minions’ team lead who attended the world championship last year.
“(World’s) was a really good experience, but we weren’t going there to win, we were going there to experience,” he added. “It really showed what robotics is and how it brings everybody together.”
When students attended last year’s world championship in Dallas, a PPCMS team member who spoke Mandarin landed the school’s robotics team an invitation from the Chinese delagation to visit their hotel ballroom expo.
“(The Chinese teams) are the world champions, they are unbelievable,” Salcedo-Machado said. “All their teams were there and we practiced with them until midnight and it was such a cool experience to see ... the shared camaraderie of people that just love robotics.”
For Salcedo-Machado’s girls, it would mean seeing themselves represented in what she considers “a mostly male-dominated” field.
“I know how girls work and how analytic and detail-oriented they are, and those are the skills that make a great engineer,” she said. “(At the world championships) there’s a whole ‘girl power’ section, which is why I’m dying for my girls to make it, because they have talks for them and even a separate area just for them.”
Fundraising efforts, robotics life lessons
Optimistic about how her students will fare at regionals, Salcedo-Machado has already started fundraising efforts to get her teams to the world championships without placing too high of a financial burden on families.
A GoFundMe started in late February had raised $395 out of the $1,400 needed as of March 6.
Pembroke Pines Charter Middle School’s yearly contribution, approximately $2,000, is largely spent on registration fees to participate in Vex Robotics competition, which can average $250 for each of Salcedo-Machado’s six teams.
All money raised through the fundraiser will go toward competition registration fees, travel, lodging, equipment and materials, she says.
If her students don’t make it to the world championships, funds will be used to replace outdated equipment in the school’s robotics program.
But beyond winning a trophy on Sunday or at the world championships, Salcedo-Machado hopes her students can take away life lessons that go beyond engineering.
“I always tell them there’s just so much more than robotics to be learned here. You learn how to be a leader, you learn how to listen to others’ ideas,” she said. “Robotics is like a band. You form your little family and you blossom.”
