On May 30, Oakland’s Roosevelt Middle School (RMS) sent a team of blossoming robotics experts to the 2015 C-STEM Day RoboPlay Challenge Competition at University of California, Davis (UC Davis). The Roosevelt Bulldog Robotics Team, students from a newly created robotics course at RMS, were mentored by retired scientists and Children Rising volunteers Mark and Joanne Perra. The team won third place out of thirty-six teams in their division, which is composed of Northern California middle schools.

The RoboPlay Challenge is one of three competitions that take place during C-STEM Day, an annual event organized by the UC Davis Center for Integrated Computing and STEM Education. C-STEM is an acronym for “Computing, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.” The event encourages middle-school and high-school students to demonstrate real-world problem-solving skills in a competitive environment.

Professor Harry Cheng, director of the C-STEM Center at UC Davis, publicly recognized the RMS team for a strong showing and for the fact that this team was the first ever from Oakland to participate in the competition. Sporting bronze medals around their necks, the students and their classroom teacher Zelda Allison proudly received a trophy in the concluding awards ceremony. When he heard about the win, former OUSD Superintendent Gary Yee said, “Can you believe how far we’ve come since Mark and Joanne Perra brought the UC Davis C-STEM program to the attention of district leaders in 2013? Can’t be more excited.”

Children Rising is a major supporter of the C-STEM launch at RMS, supplying volunteers and funding.