On Saturday morning, January 10, 2026, in approximately 3,700 high school auditoriums, gymnasiums, and engineering classrooms across thirty countries, students aged 14 to 18 watched a synchronized video feed from FIRST headquarters in Manchester, New Hampshire, as the FIRST Robotics Competition revealed the year’s game. The format has not changed in any significant way since the program’s first season in 1992. Each team receives an identical “kit of parts” containing motors, wheels, sensors, a control system, and structural materials. The teams have exactly six weeks to design, build, program, and test a 125-pound robot capable of playing a game whose rules they learned that morning for the first time. The 2026 season — called REBUILT, presented by Haas, with kickoff sponsored by Qualcomm — runs through eight weeks of regional qualifying tournaments in March and early April, with the world championship scheduled for April 29 through May 2 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. The teams that win their regional events advance to Houston. The teams that win in Houston earn the right to be called world champions of an event that, in any quantitative sense, is the largest annual gathering of secondary-school engineers anywhere on Earth.
FIRST — For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology — was founded in 1989 by the inventor Dean Kamen, the same Dean Kamen who invented the Segway, the AutoSyringe insulin pump, the iBOT motorized wheelchair, the home dialysis system that became the foundation of DEKA Research, and roughly five hundred other patented devices. Kamen, with assistance from MIT professor emeritus Woodie Flowers, designed the FIRST format around a single thesis: that American secondary education was failing to produce the engineers the country would need to build the next century’s economy, that the failure was structural rather than incidental, and that the solution was not better textbooks but a national robotics competition that would make engineering feel like a varsity sport. The 1992 inaugural FIRST competition had 28 teams in a New Hampshire high school gym. The 2024 season had 3,701 active FRC teams in 30 countries and regions, with parallel competitions — FIRST LEGO League for elementary and middle school (35,140 teams at last published count), FIRST Tech Challenge for older middle and high school, FIRST LEGO League Explore for the youngest students — adding another 50,000-plus teams to the global FIRST footprint. The competition has, in operational terms, become the most successful workforce-development program in modern American technology history.
This is the domain where the cluster’s running thesis about robotics meets the question of where the engineers who actually build the robots come from. The humanoid robots at Figure AI and Apptronik, the Skydio drones operating Drone-as-First-Responder programs for 1,500 American police departments, the autonomous haul trucks running across Rio Tinto’s Pilbara mine, the Boston Dynamics Spot platforms patrolling BP’s Mad Dog offshore platform, the Trajekt Arc pitching robots in nineteen MLB clubhouses, and the Sikorsky-Rain autonomous Black Hawk dropping water on California wildfires were, almost without exception, designed by engineers who built their first robot in a high school workshop for a FIRST or VEX competition. The talent pipeline worked exactly the way Kamen designed it. The 2026 cohort building robots in those 3,700 gymnasiums is the cohort that will, in roughly a decade, be building the next generation of every robotic platform the rest of this cluster has been describing.
VEX Robotics and the parallel competition ecosystem
The competing platform — and, by raw team count, the larger of the two — is VEX Robotics, founded in 2007 by Tony Norman and Bob Mimlitch at Innovation First International in Greenville, Texas, with the VEX V5 Robotics Competition (V5RC) as its high school flagship and the VEX University Robotics Competition (VURC) for colleges. VEX operates more than 20,000 registered teams across more than 50 countries, with the 2025-2026 game called Push Back and the world championship held annually at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas. The 2026 V5RC High School World Championship was won by team 1028A, “WASHED,” with Excellence Award honors going to 9181C, “C-Channel.” The team names — “WASHED,” “Exothermic Burnout,” “Cyber Spacers,” “Iron Panthers,” “The Cheesy Poofs” (FIRST team 254, the all-time leader with five championship titles) — are the kind of distinctively-teenaged branding decisions that have, in retrospect, become a load-bearing cultural feature of the entire ecosystem. The kids who name their robot “Exothermic Burnout” are the kids who go on to win the DARPA Robotics Challenge ten years later.
The VEX program differs from FIRST in two structurally important ways. First, the build budget is dramatically lower — a competitive VEX team can field a robot for under $1,500 in parts, where a FIRST FRC robot routinely costs $5,000 to $15,000 between kit-of-parts components, custom machining, and travel — which makes VEX the dominant program in lower-income school districts and in countries where corporate sponsorship is thinner. Second, the VEX season is shorter and the games are smaller-scale, which puts the design and iteration cycle on a tighter clock and produces a different style of engineer — faster, scrappier, less reliant on adult mentorship. RoboCup, founded in 1996 with the explicit goal of fielding a fully autonomous robot soccer team capable of defeating the human World Cup champions by 2050, sits adjacent to both programs as the global research-grade competition, drawing university teams from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Tokyo Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich, and a long roster of others. BEST Robotics, founded in 1993 in Sherwood, Texas, occupies the middle ground with a more limited parts budget and a creative-problem-solving emphasis. The combined global footprint of secondary-school robotics competition — FIRST + VEX + BEST + RoboCup juniors + a long tail of national and regional programs — is, by team count, well over 80,000 teams and somewhere north of a million students participating annually as of 2026.
LEGO Education, Sphero, Wonder Workshop, and the elementary-school tier
Below the competition tier is the classroom-product tier — the physical robotics kits and platforms designed for elementary and early middle school instruction. LEGO Education dominates this market with the SPIKE Prime kit (launched in 2019, designed for grades 6-8 around a programmable Bluetooth hub and the LEGO Technic part system), the SPIKE Essential kit for grades 1-5, and the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 that defined the category from 2013 until LEGO discontinued the Mindstorms consumer line in October 2022 to consolidate development around the Education-branded products. The discontinuation announcement was, in the robotics-education community, treated roughly the same way the discontinuation of a popular automobile model would be treated by the car enthusiast community — a piece of cultural infrastructure being shut down for reasons that were essentially commercial rather than pedagogical. The SPIKE Prime that replaced it is a more sophisticated product but does not have the consumer-retail availability or the brand recognition of the Mindstorms line it succeeded.
Sphero, founded in 2010 in Boulder, Colorado, sells the BOLT programmable robotic ball, the indi elementary classroom robot, and the RVR programmable rover, with classroom-pack configurations sold to school districts at volume pricing. Wonder Workshop, founded in 2012 in Sunnyvale, California, sells the Dash, Dot, and Cue robots for elementary classroom use, with a curriculum tied to the Blockly visual programming language used in over 20,000 American elementary schools. Ozobot sells line-following educational robots that respond to color-coded markers drawn on paper. Makeblock in Shenzhen sells the mBot line into the Chinese, European, and increasingly American elementary classroom market, part of the broader Chinese ed-tech-and-hardware export effort that has, in education robotics as in agricultural drones and consumer drones, captured large global market share through aggressive price competition. The hardware in every one of these platforms depends on the same semiconductor supply chain, the same rare-earth permanent magnets in the motors, and the same lithium-ion battery chemistry as every commercial robotics platform the rest of the cluster has documented — a fact that the K-12 robotics-education market mostly does not advertise, but that creates a generation of students who, by the time they enter the workforce, have grown up assuming that the components in their classroom kits and the components in industrial robots are the same components. KIBO by KinderLab Robotics in Waltham, Massachusetts, sells a screen-free programmable robot specifically designed for ages 4-7, marketed against the early-childhood-screen-time concerns that have been intensifying across pediatric medicine since roughly 2018. The combined U.S. classroom-robotics market — across all elementary and middle school products — is, depending on definition, somewhere in the $400 million to $700 million range annually, growing at roughly 8-12% per year, and dominated almost entirely by physical hardware rather than software.
The Khanmigo curve and the AI tutor wave
In parallel — and, in the 2024-2026 ed-tech conversation, almost entirely crowding out the physical-robotics-in-schools story — is the AI-tutor wave. Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, its GPT-4-powered AI tutor and teaching-assistant platform, on March 14, 2023, the same day OpenAI publicly released GPT-4. Khan Academy was one of OpenAI’s earliest external partners for GPT-4 access. The product is a custom-prompted GPT-4 wrapper, designed to engage students in Socratic-style questioning rather than to supply direct answers. The initial rollout was a paid pilot for donors and selected schools. By the 2023-2024 school year, Khanmigo had roughly 40,000 K-12 student users. By 2024-2025, that number had jumped to 700,000 — what Khan Academy’s chief learning officer Kristen DiCerbo publicly described as “the biggest one-year jump that I have seen in terms of adoption of an education technology” in twenty years of ed-tech work. The projected 2025-2026 user base is over one million students. New Hampshire became the first U.S. state to sign a statewide Khanmigo partnership in June 2024, with the agreement extended through 2025-2026 at no cost to the state under Khan Academy’s nonprofit-pricing model.
Khanmigo is not a robot. It is a chat interface running on top of OpenAI’s API, with a curriculum-aware prompt structure that Khan Academy has been refining for three years. The product is the closest thing the ed-tech industry has produced to what venture capital has been promising since the early 2010s — a personalized one-on-one tutor available 24 hours a day for every student in the world. The pedagogical evidence for the product is mixed. The 60 Minutes feature in December 2024, the New Hampshire statewide deployment, the Microsoft partnership that made Khanmigo’s teacher tools free globally in 34+ languages, and the expansion into school systems in India, Brazil, and the Philippines have made it the highest-profile AI-in-education product in the world. Whether it actually improves measured student outcomes remains, as of 2026, an open empirical question that the published clinical-trial-grade evidence has not yet conclusively answered — though the user-growth curve has been steep enough that the question may be answered by adoption rather than by research.
The South Korean AI textbook disaster
The cautionary case in 2025-2026 was South Korea. Under former president Yoon Suk Yeol, the South Korean Ministry of Education spent roughly 1.2 trillion won — approximately $830 million U.S. — to develop and deploy AI Digital Textbooks (AIDT) in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms beginning in March 2025. Publishers invested another 800 billion won developing 76 approved AIDT titles. The program was launched as mandatory for English, mathematics, and computer science instruction in grades 3-4 of elementary school, first-year middle school, and first-year high school. The Ministry of Education trained 1,200 “digital tutors” and committed an additional $43.2 million to install monitoring systems in 6,000 primary and secondary schools.
The program collapsed in approximately four months. The AI textbooks failed to recognize numbers handwritten by students, flagged correct answers as wrong, and produced what users described as “nonsensical responses.” Teachers reported their workload had increased rather than decreased. Parents organized — 56,505 signatures on a petition opposing the rollout in May and June 2024 alone, with 86% of polled parents and teachers opposing the program by the time it launched. The Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union and the civic group Political Mamas sued the Minister of Education in November 2024 for abuse of authority. By October 2025, over half of the 4,095 schools that had signed onto the program had opted out. After Yoon’s impeachment and removal from office in 2024, his successor revoked the official “textbook” status of the AIDT, reclassifying them as “supplementary materials” — leaving publishers who had invested in the platform without the legal mandate they had developed against. As of late 2025, AIDT adoption sits at roughly 30% across approved subjects, mostly in schools whose principals chose to continue using the materials as optional supplements.
The South Korean disaster is the cleanest published case of “government rollout of AI in schools” failing at national scale. Compare it to the LAUSD “Ed” AI chatbot disaster — the Los Angeles Unified School District‘s March 2024 launch of an AI student-support chatbot that collapsed within months after the contracted vendor, AllHere Education, filed for bankruptcy and the system was found to have serious privacy and functionality issues. The pattern is consistent across both: an ambitious top-down deployment of AI-powered software into the K-12 classroom, justified by promises of personalized learning and teacher-workload reduction, that runs into operational problems and political backlash within months of launch. By contrast, FIRST Robotics — operating with no government mandate, no top-down deployment, and no software-vendor lock-in — has grown its team count every year since the COVID-19 pandemic-driven decline of 2020-2021, with the 2026 season on track to exceed pre-pandemic team counts and the Houston championship venue expanding accordingly.
The talent pipeline argument
The structural argument that makes the robotics-in-education category cluster-relevant is the workforce pipeline. Boston Dynamics‘ senior engineering staff includes Atlas program leads who participated in FIRST as high school students in the mid-2000s, and whose graduate-school research projects involved earlier-generation Spot platforms acquired by university robotics labs. Skydio‘s founding team came out of MIT and Stanford robotics laboratories whose member rosters were dominated by FIRST and VEX alumni. Figure AI‘s engineering leadership includes alumni of the DARPA Robotics Challenge teams from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) — all of whom had, in the previous decade, been products of the FIRST competition pipeline. Anduril‘s autonomy and drone teams, Zipline‘s aerospace engineering staff, Saildrone‘s naval-architecture group, Trajekt Sports‘ mechanical-engineering team that built the 1,200-pound MLB pitching robot, BRINC Drones‘ robotics group that built the LEMUR 2 indoor tactical drone — the talent supply across the entire commercial robotics industry, by every available company-history reconstruction, draws disproportionately from the FIRST and VEX competition pipeline.
The reason this matters is that the secondary effects of the FIRST and VEX investment are structurally enormous and almost entirely uncaptured by the program’s nominal mission statement. The kid who joins the FIRST team in tenth grade and learns to weld an aluminum frame, machine a custom gearbox, debug a Java control loop, and write a competition strategy briefing is the kid who, fifteen years later, is leading the autonomy team at Tesla Optimus or designing the next generation of Husqvarna’s robotic lawnmower fleet or running the Skydio engineering organization. The capital cost of that training pathway — measured per resulting professional engineer — is, by every available comparison, dramatically lower than the capital cost of the equivalent university engineering program, and dramatically lower than the capital cost of the failed AI-textbook deployments. The investment in physical robotics in K-12 returns to the broader robotics industry in the form of engineers who can do the work. The investment in software-based AI tutoring returns to the AI industry in the form of, in many cases, contracts that get cancelled within a year of signing.
The Dean Kamen original thesis, in 1989, was that the United States needed to produce more engineers and that the production process should look more like the Friday night football game in a Texas high school and less like an AP Chemistry class. The intervening thirty-seven years of FIRST competition have produced, by FIRST’s own published alumni data, somewhere in the range of two to three million participants who went on to STEM careers at a rate roughly double the U.S. high school baseline. The single largest population of robotics engineers in 2026 — across warehouse automation, agricultural drones, maritime autonomy, policing drones, healthcare robots, Japanese eldercare platforms, and the humanoid-robot demo cycle that has consumed the cluster’s attention since the cluster opened — was produced, in measurable part, by a Manchester, New Hampshire nonprofit and a Greenville, Texas company that have been quietly running the same competition format for somewhere between 19 and 37 years.
Drones in the K-12 classroom
The drone side of the K-12 ecosystem is smaller and more recently formed but follows the same workforce-pipeline logic. DJI Education sells the Tello EDU and RoboMaster TT programmable drone kits into elementary and middle school classrooms with curricula tied to Scratch and Python programming. Skydio has, through its public-safety and government channels, supplied small numbers of drones to U.S. high schools running drone-pilot certification programs aligned to the FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate. The Aerial Sports League runs high-school drone-racing competitions in California, Texas, and a handful of other states. The TSA-Approved Drones in Schools program is exploring K-12 deployment of small drones for STEM curriculum integration. By comparison to the FIRST/VEX physical-robotics ecosystem, the K-12 drone education footprint is still small — measured in the low thousands of participating schools rather than the tens of thousands — but the growth curve since 2022 has been steep, and the pipeline-feeding effect into the commercial drone industry is, by analogy, expected to produce a similar workforce dividend over the next decade.
The companion robot, the autism-therapy robot, and the small categories
Three smaller categories complete the K-12 robotics picture. The first is the autism-therapy companion robot, with LuxAI‘s QTrobot (designed for ages 4-14 with autism spectrum disorder), SoftBank‘s Pepper (used in autism therapy programs across Japan, France, and the U.K.), and Embodied‘s Moxie (a small tabletop social robot for child emotional development, founded by former Jibo CEO Paolo Pirjanian) as the leading platforms. The clinical evidence base for therapy-robot interventions is modest but growing, with published trials documenting improvements in attention, social engagement, and routine compliance for children using the platforms in structured therapeutic contexts. The second is the classroom telepresence robot, with VGo (acquired by Vecna Robotics in 2015) and Double Robotics providing remote-attendance platforms for medically homebound students — a category that saw a dramatic but temporary expansion during COVID-19 and has since settled back to a smaller specialized market. The third is the library-and-makerspace robot — Sphero RVRs, LEGO SPIKE kits, and 3D-printer-and-robotics combo packs that increasingly populate the maker spaces being built in renovated school libraries across the United States, a quiet infrastructure investment that has, in operational terms, replaced the school-library budget as the single largest line item for elementary-school technology purchasing.
What 2026 looks like in robotics education
In 2026, FIRST has 3,700-plus active FRC teams, 35,000-plus FIRST LEGO League teams, and a combined K-12 footprint approaching half a million participants annually across all program tiers. VEX Robotics has 20,000-plus registered competition teams in 50-plus countries. LEGO Education’s SPIKE platform is deployed in roughly 60,000 American elementary and middle school classrooms. Sphero, Wonder Workshop, Ozobot, Makeblock, and KIBO collectively serve another 100,000-plus American elementary classrooms. The Khanmigo K-12 user base has crossed one million students, distributed across hundreds of school districts in the United States and pilot programs in India, Brazil, and the Philippines. The South Korean AI Digital Textbook program is in the process of being unwound, with adoption sitting at roughly 30% under voluntary use and the underlying publishers absorbing the losses from the cancelled mandate. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s “Ed” chatbot has been functionally retired. The 2026 FIRST Championship at Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center is scheduled for April 29 through May 2. The 2026 VEX Worlds in Dallas is scheduled for early May. The kids who will design the next generation of every robot in the rest of this cluster are, this spring, finishing six-week build seasons in roughly four thousand school workshops across thirty countries.
The robotics-in-education category is the cluster’s most upstream domain. The robots in classrooms are not the robots in mines, ports, hospitals, oil rigs, theme parks, or wildfire zones. They are the robots that the future builders of those other robots first encountered as teenagers in a gymnasium in January. The investment in FIRST and VEX over thirty-seven years has produced a workforce dividend that the rest of the robotics industry has been spending, with extraordinary results, across every domain the cluster has documented. The investment in AI-powered classroom software, in the same period, has produced mostly headlines — and, in South Korea’s case, an $830 million government-funded headline that lasted four months. The pattern across the cluster has been consistent. The robots that work are deployed where the work is real, the engineering is grounded, and the workforce has been trained for thirty years to make machines do hard things in physical environments that punish error. The kids in those four thousand workshops in January are building the single most important raw material the robotics industry will consume over the next thirty years. Dean Kamen built that pipeline in 1989 on a hunch about Texas high school football. The hunch turned out to be the most consequential bet in the history of American workforce development, and the rest of this cluster is, in 2026, what that bet finally cashed out as.