The competition is the product of a multi-year effort of the White House Office of American Innovation dating to 2019.<\/p>\n
The state-vs.-state contest debuted this year in the form of a March Madness-style tournament. The event also included a live Q&A with astronaut Chris Williams aboard the International Space Station and a performance by Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas.<\/p>\n
![\"Robotics](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/LJL-L-ALL-GIRLS-ROBOTICS-01.jpg\")
Robotics teams from across the United States competed in the U.S. Governors Cup in head-to-head matches. (Erwin Taganas)<\/p>\n
Team Bumble Bee applied for the coed competition not necessarily expecting to be selected. But a strong application led to the all-girls team traveling to Washington.<\/p>\n
Coach Tara Anderson described the selection as \u201csurreal.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI was definitely as excited as they were,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, there are so many good teams in California. \u2026 But I think how they responded to the questions really caught the attention of the person reviewing all the applications.\u201d<\/p>\n
The team<\/p>\n
Team Bumble Bee consists of Lana, Country Day 11th-graders Lauren Mitnick and Ariana Du; Scripps Ranch High School 12th-graders Liberty Morgan and Jacquelyn Lee; Mesa Verde Middle School sixth-grader Victoria Taganas and Del Norte High School 11th-grader Shriya Paladugu.<\/p>\n
Jacquelyn and Liberty serve as mechanical co-leads. Mentoring the team are Erwin Taganas and Rudra Sengupta, engineers for the Navy and Qualcomm, respectively.<\/p>\n
Flexibility was an impetus for the team\u2019s formation three years ago. As Lana waited for La Jolla Country Day\u2019s girls tennis team to firm up its schedule, she worried about whether she also would be able to participate in the school\u2019s robotics team.<\/p>\n
\u201cI needed to know if I could attend or not, and because I didn\u2019t know, I just decided it would be better to continue robotics by creating my own team that wasn\u2019t restricted to what the school could do, which included weekend meetings,\u201d Lana said.<\/p>\n
Her friend Lauren, who leads the group\u2019s outreach efforts, including school visits, filming content and posting team news on social media, joined as a 10th-grader, though robotics wasn\u2019t necessarily her forte.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore joining this team, I didn\u2019t like STEM [science, technology, engineering and math], I didn\u2019t like robotics, nothing related to that,\u201d Lauren said. \u201cI was invited by my friend to join to design merch and \u2026 run the social media account. \u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I really enjoy about being a part of robotics is being able to see the intersection of the humanities and arts, which I am more adept at, and being able to see how that can be used in other fields such as STEM.\u201d<\/p>\n
With two members graduating this year and four entering 12th grade, the team is readying for a transition to younger members.<\/p>\n
The competition<\/p>\n
Lauren described the trip to D.C. as \u201can incredibly inspiring experience.\u201d Participants were able to speak to representatives of tech companies and prestigious universities and, in some cases, elected officials.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo be able to be with teams of the highest caliber and realize that these \u2026 are people I will probably meet later down the line when I\u2019m in college \u2026 and also seeing all the tech companies that were there \u2026 was just amazing,\u201d Lauren said.<\/p>\n
Lana said she enjoyed meeting other teams and exchanging pins, buttons and stickers.<\/p>\n
![\"Team](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/LJL-L-ALL-GIRLS-ROBOTICS-02.jpg\")
Team Bumble Bee, in matching yellow jerseys, socializes with another team at the U.S. Governors Cup Feb. 20-21 in Washington, D.C. (Erwin Taganas)<\/p>\n
One source of stress, however, was getting to Washington while transporting the team\u2019s robot across the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was constantly worried if the robot was OK while we were flying,\u201d Lana said.<\/p>\n
Team Bumble Bee, like the 49 others in the competition, designed, built and programmed its robot for head-to-head matchups. The girls represented California with a bee-themed design and coordinated uniforms.<\/p>\n
\u2018Really great thing\u2019<\/p>\n
Though they finished 39th in the competition, the significance of being an all-girls team in a large coed tournament wasn\u2019t lost on the members and their coach.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we just wanted to represent our state and do well,\u201d Lana said. \u201cI think having an all-girl team really showed the diversity that is present.\u201d<\/p>\n
Anderson said\u00a0\u201cI think it was a really great way to demonstrate that being an all-girls team, even though the dynamics are a little different, they can compete at a very high level.\u201d<\/p>\n
She noted a change between now and a few years ago, when \u201cat least in the San Diego region, we were the only true all-girls robotics team. And this year, there\u2019s at least five other all-girls robotics teams in San Diego. I think that was a really, really great thing to see in such a short period of time.\u201d \u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When La Jolla Country Day School 11th-grader Lana Lee, founder of a community-based robotics team, caught wind that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":232323,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[7,930,5184,6804,74,84,76,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-232322","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-la-jolla","10":"tag-la-jolla-light","11":"tag-la-jolla-light-news","12":"tag-san-diego","13":"tag-san-diego-county","14":"tag-san-diego-headlines","15":"tag-san-diego-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}