Happy Kids Robotics teaches children aged 6 to 14 to design, build and program VEX robots. Weekly classes, a competition team that goes to real tournaments, and camps when school is out.
The ages we teach, from first gears to competition season
Teams competing at VEX IQ tournaments this season
Themed weeks in the summer camp rotation
Lab in Glendora with a full VEX field set up and ready
Not a stock photo of a classroom. This is 1311 S Grand Ave on an ordinary afternoon.
A robotics class can mean a lot of things. Here is what it means in this room.
Students are not assembling a model from a photo. They decide what the robot needs to do, build something that might do it, watch it fail, and fix it. One of our teams rebuilt a drivetrain over a month because they built the same side twice and had to mirror the whole thing. That month is the lesson.
Our teams enter VEX IQ tournaments: pit tables, qualification matches, a scoreboard, a referee in a striped shirt. A deadline with other people watching changes how a twelve year old treats their own work, and it does it faster than any worksheet.
The person running the room has won at the top of this sport. That shows up in small corrections: how to brace a tower so it stops flexing, when a gear ratio is the problem and not the code, what judges are actually listening for.
Every VEX team sits down with a judge and answers questions out loud: what does your robot do, what would you change, what are you proudest of. We rehearse that. A student who can explain a design decision to a stranger understands it, and that skill outlives the robot.
Students move between these as they are ready. Nobody is held to a track because of their birthday.
First builds. Gears, ratios, levers and balance, through machines small enough to finish and test in one session: a claw bot, a tug of war rig, a catapult.
A robot of their own, built from the VEX IQ system and programmed to do a job: follow a line, clear a maze, drive a path without a driver. Blocks first, text when they are ready.
A season: design, build, iterate, drive practice, judge interview prep, then tournaments. Students take real roles, driver, builder, coder, documenter, loader, and answer for their part.
On a competition team nobody is a spectator. Each student holds a role, and at a tournament they have to answer for it in front of a judge who has never met them.
Runs the robot in the match, and practises the same forty seconds until the hands stop thinking about it.
Owns the mechanism. Decides what gets cut, reinforced or thrown out after a bad match.
Writes the autonomous routine and the controller mapping, then debugs it with the clock running.
Keeps the engineering notebook, which is judged. Every change has to be written down and dated.
Feeds the robot during the match. Sounds small until a mistimed load costs a scoring round.
Four small games, free, no sign-up. Program a robot to run an autonomous route, pick a gear ratio that can actually climb the ramp, read binary against the clock, and wire logic gates until the output matches.
Built for students. Parents are welcome to lose at them too.
Pick the level that matches how deep your child wants to go. Every level includes lab time with the field set up.
$280 / month
For students starting out
$480 / month
For students heading towards competition
$899 / month
For students on a full season
Not sure which one? Book a trial class first. We will tell you honestly where your child fits after we have watched them build something.
We teach children aged 6 to 14. The youngest start on Little Engineers, where the build is simple enough to finish in a session and the ideas are real: gears, ratios, balance, why a thing tips over.
From there students move into VEX IQ, where they build and program a robot of their own, and then into the competition team.
No. Most students arrive having never written a line. Coding starts as blocks, which is drag and drop, and the step up to text happens when the student is ready for it, not on a fixed date.
1311 S Grand Ave #170, Glendora, CA 91740. We are in the San Gabriel Valley, close to San Dimas, La Verne, Covina, Azusa and Claremont.
Yes. Book a trial class through the enrolment form and bring your child in to build something. You will see the lab, meet the coach and watch how a session runs before you commit to anything.
VEX IQ is the elementary and middle school level of VEX Robotics, built around a snap-together system with motors, sensors and a controller. Each year has a new game with its own scoring rules, so teams design a robot for that specific challenge and compete against other teams at tournaments.
No. Weekly classes stand on their own. Competition is there for students who want it, and plenty do, but nobody is pushed onto a team to stay in the program.
Bring your child in, let them build something, see whether this room is for them. The enrolment form takes about a minute.
Happy Kids