August 25, 2026 · Piedmont Makers
A Piedmont Makers coach helped this season's used mission models find a second life at a girls' school in Tanzania.
Mike Xu coaches LEGO League Challenge for Piedmont Makers and volunteers with Nurturing Minds in Africa. When a federal grant supporting SEGA, a girls’ secondary school in Tanzania, was cut last spring, the nonprofit found funding for ten SPIKE robot kits but had no mission models or guidebooks to build a program around. Piedmont Makers had exactly that: after our Community Tournament wrapped, coaches set aside five sets of this season’s Unearthed mission models and mats, plus guidebooks from teams that no longer needed them, all bound for SEGA instead of the usual bin of spare parts.
SEGA’s robotics club has been training with the donated gear since December, working session by session under Mike’s coaching from the East Bay. Piedmont Makers is now listed among the program’s sponsors, and volunteers plan to carry the mats and mission structures to Tanzania in person this summer for the club’s first competition season. A season’s worth of LEGO pieces that would have gone into a parts bin is instead teaching a new group of kids how to build a robot.