August 24, 2026 · Piedmont Makers
Our 2025-26 Impact Report is out: more than 900 students from 139 schools across 20 East Bay cities, a permanent home for youth robotics in Oakland, and over $25,000 in teacher grants.
The 2025-26 school year was our biggest yet. More than 900 students joined a robotics team, and they came from 139 different schools across 20 East Bay cities, including Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, Lafayette, Moraga, and Orinda. Nearly half of them, 46%, came from outside Piedmont. For the third consecutive year, that makes this the largest community-based youth robotics league in the United States: 125+ teams spanning all four levels of FIRST, from kindergartners snapping together their first machines to high schoolers programming 120-pound competition robots.
Reach only counts if it reaches the kids who don’t already have this. Girls made up 29% of participants, 87 students came from Title 1 schools, and seven were homeschooled, families who often can’t find team-based learning anywhere else. Build Like a Girl put 61 girls in a room with high school mentors from our FTC and FRC teams for a day of wiring, screwdrivers, and working motors, with the mentors leading and the adults staying out of the way. Our LEGO League Challenge level drew the strongest economic diversity of any program we run, with 15% of students coming from Title 1 schools.
Off the competition field, we turned a temporary pilot into something permanent. When the Loom, a 10,000 square-foot practice space in Oakland, faced a steep rent increase, Piedmont Makers secured grants from the PG&E Corporation Foundation and the KLA Foundation along with an in-kind CNC router from Autodesk, then signed a multi-year lease at 3100 East 10th Street. The site holds the only community-accessible full-size FRC practice field in the Bay Area, where 19 guest teams have already logged more than 200 hours of practice. Piedmont Makers operates and funds it alongside our partners at Highlander Robotics 8033. Closer to home, we awarded more than $25,000 in teacher grants across PUSD classrooms for everything from a ceramics kiln to ECG sensors, and years of advocacy from parents, students, and Piedmont Makers ended with the school board unanimously approving AP Physics C at Piedmont High.
All of it ran on more than 1,900 volunteer hours from coaches, teachers, mentors, and families. For the complete picture, including per-school grant breakdowns and detail on every program level, follow the link to read the full 2025-26 Impact Report, also linked from our About Us page.