Hello, we are Dhanvika, Vaughn, Carlos and Caique, and together we are BRAIN BATTERIES, team 99265B! We just won the Excellence Award at the Ohio State Championships! Now, we as 4 young engineers have been invited to represent Ohio at the World Robotics Championship in Saint Louis on April 25th!

We are raising funds needed by April 15th to help cover competition costs so we can participate in this once-in-a-lifetime experience into the 2026 VEX Robotics World Championship in Saint Louis on April.

Your support will help us having continue learning, growing, and dreaming big.

Just one year ago, we started an incredible journey into the world of robotics. We began with curiosity, excitement, and the simple goal of learning how to build a robot.

At first, everything was new: designing a robot, learning programming and automation, understanding engineering concepts, and practicing how to drive and control the robot during competitions. What began as a learning experience quickly became a passion.

Robotics competitions are intense and exciting. We created our TEAM: BRAIN BATTERIES name, logo and song! And name our baby: Billy Bob 2.0.

We also learnt a lot from each other, Caique and Dhanvika with their supper driven and leadership skills, Carlos and Vaughn with their smart and hability skills, and how to work as a team, bond and also had a lot of fun! Even through stressful moments.

During each match, teams have only one minute to score as many points as possible using their robot. But competitions are not only about the matches. Judges also evaluate every team in many other areas, including robot design, engineering documentation, programming, teamwork, problem solving, and interviews where we must explain how our robot works and how we solved challenges throughout the season.

Over the past year, we committed ourselves fully to this journey. We worked two to three times every week, often spending more than two hours at a time designing, building, testing, improving, and practicing with our robot.

And… dedication paid off.

We won:

At each tournament we gained more mastery and eventually, reached a huge milestone: winning our first Excellence Award, the highest honor in robotics competitions! This award recognizes the best overall team, considering robot performance, engineering design, programming, teamwork, and communication.

This journey required enormous effort — not only from us, but also from our families who supported us every step of the way. Along the way we built friendships, learned resilience, developed engineering skills, and most importantly, had fun while learning together.

From there, we advanced to the Ohio State Championship, where we achieved our greatest accomplishment yet: winning the Excellence Award again.

This incredible achievement placed us among the top five robotics teams in the entire state of Ohio, earning them a spot at the World Robotics Championship.

Now we have the opportunity to compete on the world stage — representing our community, state, and all the hard work we have put in over the past year.

The funds will help us cover:

Thank you for helping us send this amazing team to the World Championship!