By Esther Wickham
The Center Square

Culver City High School’s California-based robotics team – known as the Bagel Bytes – has begun its 25th season of competition with this year’s challenge for students around the world to build robotics that “re-imagine the past.”

FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, an international organization that combines competitive robotics with mentorship, launched its 2026 robotics competition season in January.

Over 93,000 high school students across 35 countries participated in the 2025 FIRST Robotics Competition season, with more than 3,400 teams competing worldwide as of 2024.

This year’s game, titled REBUILT, requires teams to design robots capable of scoring yellow chips into a hub and navigating a three-bar metal climbing structure known as the Tower.

The Center Square got an exclusive interview with FIRST Robotics Competition Team 702, the Bagel Bytes, at Culver City High School in the Los Angeles area.

Dennis Paniza, a U.S. Air Force veteran with a background in electronics engineering, is in his second year as coach for the Bagel Bytes. There are 47 student members at the school

At Culver City High School, students balance long hours with academics. The club meets three days a week after school, until 9 p.m., during build season, January through April. During the off-season, students continue to plan workshops, community outreach and mentorship. The high school students teach middle and elementary school students, as well as learn from guest speakers.

“Balancing robotics and school is kind of difficult, but it’s a good challenge you have to overcome,” said Dylan Chung, a junior and robot driver for the team.

The program at CCHS operates as both a class and an after-school club, organized into subcommittees: electronics, Computer Aided Design or CAD, programming, mechanics, safety and business, each led by student heads who report to the team captains, James Cole and Nathan Salyer.

Students said the robotics club was a great way to make friends and enjoy the camaraderie that comes with competition.

“Friends is what got me in, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s a competition, and you want to win,” senior Nathan Pugh, head of mechanics, said.

Since the robotics club receives limited funding from the Culver City Unified School District, the team’s business and outreach efforts are led by senior Chaiya Jones, who manages fundraising, sponsor relations and public outreach. The subcommittee aims to raise $50,000 annually, though it typically does not need to spend the full amount.

“I think it’s truly a place of connection and community,” Jones said. “It has really built me as a person and gotten to show me the real world and work environments, and I am really grateful for who that has made me become and what that has shown me.”

In the programming department, seniors Cameron Trux and Nathan Herrera manage the robot’s motors and camera systems.

Despite the rise of artificial intelligence, the programmers expressed a cautious view of AI in coding.

“AI is not actually intelligent,” Trux said. “You can use it as a tool if you are a professional, but you don’t want to use it for something and not understand what it is spewing out.”

Herrera added that reliance on AI-generated code often leads to errors. “When you get a spew of coding nonsense and try to apply it, it usually does not work,” he said.

FIRST emphasizes its core values of teamwork, respect, learning and community involvement, while promoting inclusion across its global programs.

“We are thrilled to continue supporting FIRST as it kicks off this exciting 2026 season,” Kathy Looman, executive director of the Gene Haas Foundation, which sponsors the competition, said as the season launched on Jan. 10. “The impact of FIRST on today’s youth is unparalleled.”

Coach Paniza said the program’s primary goal is to bridge the gap between high school and professional pathways.

“A majority of our students want to head towards the engineering pathway,” Paniza said. “This is perfect at this level for them to just get familiar with it and start practicing safety, especially when they go to career or college.”

Students and mentors highlight that the program’s impact extends beyond the competition field, preparing young people today for the workforce of tomorrow.

In an exclusive interview with The Center Square, Jacob Kuhlmann, an alumnus of FIRST Robotics Team 3476, Code Orange, said the league inspires young people to pursue science and engineering “by tricking them through using competitive spirits.”

He went on to mentor the Irvine, Calif.-based team of high school students for four years after graduating. Kuhlmann said mentorship was one of the most valuable aspects of his robotics experience.

“The biggest thing that robotics does is it enables you to have time with industry mentors,” Kuhlmann said. “They invested in my future by showing me what they were doing and giving me guiding principles, and they built my confidence that doing hard things is possible.”

Kuhlmann is now a mechanical engineer at Matter Intelligence, a startup based in El Segundo, a city in the Los Angeles area. He said his time in robotics helped prepare him for both college and the workforce.

“In college, I noticed I came in with design experience,” Kuhlmann said. “Group projects were kind of a walk in the park for me, because I already knew how to set up a schedule, do the design of it, and it was pretty straightforward. But it’s not always that straightforward for people who haven’t done major engineering projects before.”