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Welcome to the VEX Robotics Educators Conference. I'm very excited about this next presentation. Let me provide a little context for this presentation about Unified Robotics. Andrew, who I'm going to introduce in a moment, actually sent me an email about a year ago with this idea. He had this idea about Unified Robotics. "Unified" is a Special Olympics term, which I had no idea about until he explained it to me. He wanted to do a unified robotics competition, similar to unified bocce, track and field, and volleyball competitions in schools.

The next step I took was to call Dr. Eddie Willson, who I'll also introduce shortly. The three of us got together, hatched a plan, and organized a local unified robotics competition in Pittsburgh, which they are going to describe to you right now. This is how the whole thing came together. I wanted to provide this context because this was not an official REC competition. It was an idea we had, and we managed to pull it off. That's the story these gentlemen will share with you today. Hopefully, this is something you can do in your area as well. That's why we brought them to our Educator's conference to discuss it. The idea is that if we could do it in Pittsburgh, why couldn't you do it wherever you are?

With that in mind, I would love to bring to the stage right now, Andrew Fee, who is the Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Western PA Special Olympics, and Dr. Eddie Willson, assistant superintendent at Woodland Hills School District.

(people clapping)

Thank you very much, Joe. Thank you so much, Jason. We'll introduce ourselves a little more in-depth shortly. As Jason said, I'm Dr. Eddie Willson, and this is my friend Andrew Fee. We want to talk to you today about Unified Robotics and what we've done in the district of Woodland Hills and in 11 other districts around Pittsburgh. Our goal is to ensure that our scholars who are neurodiverse and have various abilities can participate in VEX in the same way their neurotypical peers do, achieving success that has truly been exponential. We do this through Unified Robotics.

My name is Eddie Willson, and I am the assistant superintendent for Woodland Hills School District. I am honored and privileged to be a Tarheel, tartan, and a Pioneer. If you have a degree from UNC Chapel Hill, CMU, or Point Park, then we're on the same team. I like to think we're on the same team anyway, but that's where my loyalty lies. My kids go to Woodland Hills. I have two kids with IEPs in Woodland Hills, a sixth grader and a ninth grader. They are part of our district, and we're a Woodland Hills family. My wife leads the lobby of the Woodland Hills musical, and I coach soccer in Woodland Hills. We see this as a valuable part of who our family is and who we are.

I've been committed to equity and education since 2002. I've worked in education and public education in some leadership role since 2002. I started in the classroom and worked my way up through assistant principal, principal, to now assistant superintendent. I included this slide from Mr. McKenna himself when he was training us. I love this quote: "Creativity is intelligence having fun." I heard him talk earlier about the idea of rigor and fun coming together, which is what VEX Robotics does. We see that every day. When you can have rigor, relevance, and fun coming together, kids are engaged.

And so we're really excited about what we're doing. The mission of Unified Robotics—I'm going to be boring and read this off the slide for a second—but the mission for Unified Robotics is dedicated to fostering an inclusive environment where every member is valued and empowered. We embrace the willingness to explore new ideas and open unexpected doors. By building a foundation of empathy, we strive to understand and appreciate each other's experiences. Our community thrives on creating meaningful relationships that lead to lasting change. We believe in defining success individually, recognizing that each person's journey is unique and worthy of celebration.

I really want to call into play that last sentence, that defining success individually is really what started Unified Robotics. We recognize that there are scholars out there who feel successful when they win a competition and go to worlds. We actually have an elementary team that's going to be at Worlds here next week from Woodland Hills. But then we also have scholars who, when they successfully collaborate with a teammate, that is success for them. We want to make sure that we are recognizing successes for every kid in every way. This is actually a picture from one of our unified competitions right here.

As Jason said, I'm Andrew Fee, Vice President for Special Olympics, Pennsylvania. I am the least qualified person to ever be on this stage at this conference. I know very little about robotics, and I probably should take a picture or someone should take a picture of me, 'cause my wife does not believe that I'm here right now doing this. I need to prove to her that I am at a robotics conference.

I spent 10 years coaching athletics and college athletics, transitioning to Special Olympics mainly because I saw the true joy and passion of our athletes. To Eddie's point, when they accomplished something they didn't think they would be able to accomplish or they were included. I was a volunteer, stepped into my role in Special Olympics, Pennsylvania, and have not looked back. I felt the need to say I've instructed some classes at the college level just to build some type of reputation in this room. It was a freshman class, it was a lot of fun. I don't think anyone listened after minute six of the class. Hopefully, that's not the case today.

But my passion comes from building inclusive communities, especially in our schools. I love when people with intellectual disabilities and autism are included, accepted, and I love going back when they thrive. That means something different to each of our athletes, in my case, or participants in the Unified Robotics case. Each of them has different goals for their life, and I just love walking alongside them in that journey.

We do a lot of unified programming in the Special Olympics world. Obviously, we're sports, so we're just trying to bring people together, eliminating those barriers, removing labels, and making them equal peers. That was really the inspiration for me reaching out to my good friend Jason over there, and saying, how can we do this in robotics? I keep hearing when I go into all these schools, robotics clubs, successful teams, but I'm not seeing our athletes or our participants being included in that. All the credit to Jason, Tina, Eddie—they really made it happen. I was just excited to be a small part of that journey.

Just to give you an overview, Special Olympics has a global reach. I know some people in this room. Has anyone recognized the Special Olympics brand? Has anyone ever been involved? All right, good. So I should explain that. We have global reach. We have about 6 million athletes across the world right now. We're doing a bunch of different sports, but we're in about 180 countries. So you can find Special Olympics pretty much in any community.

Thank you for your attention and support. We look forward to continuing this journey together and making a difference in the lives of many.

The unified model shifted about 10 years ago in Pennsylvania, and about 20 years ago is when it started. What we were trying to do is remove those barriers and make it more inclusive for our participants to compete alongside people without disabilities. We're in 500 schools in Pennsylvania and 15,000 schools across the United States, doing unified programming in sports, clubs, and activities to move inclusion forward. If you don't know about it, I'd love to talk more about it. I'm not going to take time up here, but all of our programs are at no cost to our athletes or their families.

Eddie asked me to include this. I think this is our vision for Special Olympics: a world where every person, regardless of ability, is accepted and welcomed. That's really the Unified Robotics mission as well.

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What we say before every competition is our athlete oath: "Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt." I kind of go back to that. That was our start with Unified Robotics. Let's give it our all. And if we don't win this first year, we'll be brave in the attempt. But we had some good success.

Again, just going back, I think a lot of people at this point in 2025 say, "Why unified? Why do we have to force inclusion in the schools or in the community?" I think inclusion and unified is more important than it's ever been. It's definitely under attack from different angles right now. It's all about empathy and teamwork. What we're trying to do, whether it's through robotics, sports, or social activities, is encourage people to be empathetic beyond their circle. We're all usually attracted to people who think alike or act alike. We're just trying to build that empathy outside those bubbles and allow people to experience the abilities of people with disabilities. Inclusion is for everyone, not just for people with disabilities.

One of the things I always say when we're talking to schools is that our scholars will eventually become business owners, managers, vice presidents, or presidents of companies. If they have interactions with people with disabilities now, whether it's Down syndrome, autism, or whatever it is, they're more likely to hire someone with a disability later in life when they come in for an interview. If their first interaction with someone with Down syndrome is during that interview 20 years later, they're probably not going to hire that person due to stigmas and what they think they know about people with disabilities. So when we start breaking down those barriers at a younger age, it leads to long-term change. Right now, that's a crucial thing we have to do in our schools and communities.

Also, problem-solving and social interaction are important. Our people with IDD are experiencing a lot of mental health issues due to social isolation. Ugh, I can't say the word, say it for me. It's okay, isolation. Gotcha. Ugh, need more water. And collaboration, that's really good. Yeah, collaboration. The mental health aspect of being included and socializing with people different from them is really important.

I think the world right now needs more understanding of the value of diversity, as Eddie just said, and collaboration, from both the mental health and inclusion standpoints. I would just like you to consider, even if it's not Unified Robotics, what you can do in your schools right now to promote more inclusion, especially with people with intellectual disabilities and autism.

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Thank you for your time and consideration. Let's work together to create a more inclusive world for everyone.

How can you bring them into a circle that they might not be included in right now to help the people without disabilities gain more understanding and empathy and allow them more opportunities to be involved?

So. All right, sorry, here we go Eddie. Yeah, so then, so that's why Special Olympics, and we're very, very happy to partner with Special Olympics.

Woodland Hills School District is also extremely unique in our own history. We are one of the last districts in the United States that was formed through a court order to be racially integrated. We are 12 communities that are extremely diverse. We have wealthy, affluent, predominantly white communities. We have predominantly African American communities. We have both white and black, predominantly white and black communities that are low SES and high SES. We have 12 communities that are all brought together. The entire district was brought together and formed out of a celebration of diversity. We are really, really meaningfully explicit when we talk about celebrating diversity and making sure that everyone is included and is welcome.

We're a mid-size district, with about 3,200 students. We're adjacent to Pittsburgh, touching the city of Pittsburgh. As I mentioned, we are 75% students of color, with more than 80%, 82% this year, on free or reduced lunch. When we talk about Unified Robotics, the big thing is that we have 30% of our kids with IEPs. When we talk about anything that's unified, we talk about including our students with IEPs, our neurodiverse students, our students with autism, and those with intellectual disabilities. Up until we were really meaningfully and explicitly including everyone, we had three out of every 10 kids that were automatically being taken out of the picture.

I've got teachers who, six years ago when I came into the district, would say, "Oh yeah, that kid's got an IEP, so he's not really mine," when I would do observations. I'd have kids trying to raise their hand, and they'd say, "Oh, that's not really my kid." We really wanted to ensure that our educators, our families, and our communities understand that all kids are our kids. We have struggled historically with academics, and we really see robotics as a whole. I'll be here tomorrow when Mr. McKenna talks about the VEX continuum. We believe that VEX and the VEX continuum have really helped us to boost our math and science scores and our overall success for our scholars, however they define that success.

We are really proud to be partners both with VEX and with Special Olympics. Our vision is that students are empowered to embrace learning and to excel at their own future. Our mission is to ensure that we are meeting rigor, relevance, and relationships at all times. Kids have to be met where they are, right? If I'm one of those scholars that is at a college level in my reading, then that's great. We have to meet them at a college level. If I'm a scholar that's three grade levels behind in my reading, I have to be met at that level too. We have to ensure that we're having rigor and that students understand why they're doing things.

When we talk about unified robotics, we talk about all of the worlds and doors that robotics opens for our scholars. When we talk about relationships, our big goal is to build collaborators. When we think about education now, as opposed to education from 20 years ago, we know that 20 years ago the idea was to teach kids how to find the right answers. But now, with generative AI, with Google right here, with our phones where they are, we're not trying to teach kids how to find the right answers; we're teaching kids how to find the right questions.

How do you do prompt engineering in a way that you can continue to build and collaborate and work together to find solutions to the problems in the world? I just named relationships, relevance, and rigor. We can skip through this slide, but those are the big things that we talk about in Woodland Hills.

We wrote this grant, and the grant came. We were kind of at a perfect storm of good ideas because Andrew emailed Jason right about the same time that Tina Dietrich—Tina, if you could wave for everybody—Tina's my director of STEAM and innovation in the district. She was running a local district-wide elementary VEX competition, not REC, not official in any way, but just like, hey, for our kids, yay. Come in and show your robotic skills.

In the district-wide competition, the kid that was most engaged and the kid that was super excited that everyone could point out, the principal of that kid pulled me aside and said, "You know, that kid's in a full-time AS classroom, a full-time autistic support classroom, they don't ever get into math and reading with their neurotypical peers." And so, like a light bulb went off—holy crap, we've got kids that are not even in classes with their neurotypical peers that are excelling because of actual robotics. We have to do something so we can expand that so that we can really bring that to scale.

We wrote a Moonshot grant. We got a $35,000 grant. Thank you, Grayville Foundation, to start a unified league. Now we have a dozen districts from Western Pennsylvania that have formed this Unified Robotics league, and we're going to expand. But all of the leagues are extremely diverse. We have urban districts like ours, we have rural districts, we have wealthy, we have poor, we have white, we have Black, we have high IEP populations and low IEP populations. They're really, really amazing.

This picture also comes from one of our unified competitions. You'll see there are two schools competing here, but there are also four school districts around just cheering kids on. These are kids from all backgrounds, from all walks of life. We've really been able to bring that together through Unified Robotics.

When we talk about what unified looks like, specifically for Unified Robotics—and I think this is true for all unified sports—teams have to have at least 50% of scholars who have some type of disability. For us, that's usually neurodiverse scholars, so kids with IEP. Every single team has to have at least 50% of kids who are neurodiverse working with their neurotypical peers.

One of the statistics that's alarming in schools right now is about 80% of people with disabilities are claiming that they're bullied regularly. Obviously, it makes a lot of sense when they're part of a team with people without disabilities, at this even ratio, they build those friendships and are more likely to have someone stick up for them in those school environments when they normally would be bullied. I think that's an alarming statistic, but an important one as we think about building more unified programming.

When we talk about recruiting scholars, one of the things that we knew we had to do was to really get into classrooms. We asked our sponsors at all 12 school districts to meet with the educators in the schools, the principals. We engaged directly with the student body to find kids who are interested. We had our sponsors go into classrooms to meet with kids, and then we reached out to the special ed teachers in those schools. "Hey, who on your caseload do you think might really be interested? Who's being ignored right now? Who's being forgotten? Who might slip through the cracks?" We also really emphasized that point, right? So Andrew talked about that.

He's the last person that should be presenting at a robotics conference. I'm probably the second to last person that should be presenting at a robotics conference. We don't know anything about robotics, but we are super invested in this because we're seeing so much success.

We emphasized to our teachers, I've got my high school sponsor. She's an English language learner teacher. She absolutely knew nothing about robotics before she came in, but she knew that there were kids who could see value in this and who could really succeed. So our big emphasis was that there's no prior experience necessary and that it's just a fun hands-on way for them to get social STEM experiences in the world.

I threw this slide in just so that you could identify with the timeline that we did. It does require a significant amount of planning to run a Unified Robotics team and Unified Robotics lead. We started back in June and July with finding coaches and finding people to lead teams. Then we started our kickoff at the beginning of the school year, so that we could run our first competition in November. Like I said, we ran three competitions this year. Next year we hope to expand that to five competitions, but you do have to start early. So if this is something that you're interested in, let's talk now so that you can get the key stakeholders in your district on board and you can start planning in June and July.

Yeah, I think it also is important to acknowledge that it takes a different level of flexibility when you're trying to do Unified Robotics and include people that maybe aren't used to STEM programming, in our case, sports. The families, the support systems aren't always used to the commitment of practices and additional sessions and competitions. So I think the extra time allows you to build in some of those pain points and tension where it might not be with a neurotypical team. So I just, I encourage in any of these unified programs to just add some time so you can be a little more flexible, take a little more time explaining and helping people understand the program.

One of the things that we really like about Unified Robotics is that it really helps our scholars to collaborate and communicate. So when we think about all of our kids, K-12, neurodiverse, neurotypical, intellectual disabilities, all of the complete spectrum, what we wanna build is this strong leadership. We are hopefully teaching our scholars to be collaborators in the world. When a kid graduates from Woodland Hills, nobody, no one's going to ever ask them what they got on their chem final exam. Nobody's going to care what their high school GPA was outside of a college admissions. No one that's actually looking to build a successful society is going to care about what their grades were. But they will care that they're collaborative. They'll care that they're able to lead a team and they'll care that they have skills like time management, right?

Regular practice sessions, like Andrew said. We got a lot of scholars this is really the hardest thing, is all right, we meet every Tuesday for practice. Okay, well, I'm not used to people having that high expectation for me. So how do we build in scaffolding that helps kids to understand that? That encouragement of creativity and innovation, making sure that our scholars are thinking outside of the box. What's fun about this is that usually the kids who are neurodiverse are much better at that creativity and innovation than neurotypical kids, right? My scholars that are on the spectrum, they know five different ways to solve a problem because they've had to think of five different ways to solve every other problem in their life. And my neurotypical kids are like, I don't know, it's supposed to be a then b. That's not the way that the world works.

And then we really focus on that team spirit and that mutual respect and celebrating all achievements across the board. I think something that Eddie didn't highlight, though, that's important, I don't know, does anyone know the most famous alum from Woodland Hills? Anyone? Oh boy. You know. Never ask a question that someone in the audience doesn't know. That's the number one rule. Oh man, they ought to know. He was a famous football player. I'll let you Google it on your phone.

But if they can do robotics and STEM in this way at Woodland Hills, because of their sports background and how everyone's so macho there and the weight rooms, the most beautiful weight room on the East coast of the United States. Sure is. I really think that's an amazing story in itself where they're breaking down those barriers in a place that, you know, no offense to Woodland Hills in any way, but probably hasn't been top of mind for a while there.

So one thing that, just going back to the long-term effects. So people with intellectual disabilities, and I know I'm focusing on that 'cause that's who we serve, but they have a 20-year less life expectancy than people without right now. And we really feel that these types of programs can help change that statistic. And also 66% of them are unemployed. So that's significantly higher than people without disabilities. And these people are begging for work. These people want to work, they wanna work more, more hours than people without disabilities, a lot of the time. So this is allowing them to be job-ready or have these collaborative experiences when they transition outta school or graduate to be a part of something bigger than themselves.

Anyone get that answer on the famous alum? There it is. There it is. Get this guy a prize. Rob Gronkowski, you know, superstar, Super Bowl. MVP, I think twice, you know. Jason Taylor's another one. Oh, we can just shout them all. Miles Sanders, Lousaka Polite, Steve Breaston. They're all Woodland Hills alum. What did I start? Here we go, moving on. Name that we also have three stars on Broadway right now. Woodland Hills is really where it's at people.

When we talk about competitions and we talk about inclusivity, especially for our scholars who are neurodivergent, I named earlier that one of the areas in which we wanted to focus was ensuring that our scholars were meeting a high bar, right? Expectations aren't lowered for our neurotypical, our neurodiverse, we're neurotypical scholars, but that we keep a high bar for all of our scholars. And so when we talk about the competitions, we really love the fact that you've got two teams with one robot working together. That level of collaboration doesn't change regardless of your status, regardless of your grade level, regardless of whatever. You're expected to collaborate and work together.

And then, as the guy that's in charge of curriculum and instruction, the notebooks are what I love the most. Engineering notebooks, for anybody that doesn't have familiarity, I'm assuming everybody in this room does. But if you don't have familiarity with engineering notebooks, they have inspired a group of kids in Woodland Hills that never liked to write to become writers. My son's one of them. Nate Willson hates writing and his handwriting is like his dad's. But when he's in his engineering notebook, he can't stop, right? And then I thought about this and then we decided to design the claw, but the claw wasn't going to work. And so we had to do an intake model that's totally different. This idea of him as a writer or any of our scholars who prior to Unified Robotics were not fans of reading and writing, in order to complete their engineering notebooks to the level that they're expected to from their coaches, they became writers, they're becoming writers. And it's really, really cool to see.

But then also this idea that we have a team playing alone against the clock.

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Thank you all for being here today and for your continued support. We are excited about the future and the impact we can make together.

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Thank you once again, and have a great day!

Teaching our kids that it doesn't matter if you're better than the person next to you, it matters if you're better than the you from yesterday. Right? Teaching our kids that all they're trying to do is get a little bit better every day and that what we're focused on is growth, has been one of the main goals of Unified Robotics.

I already talked about the engineering notebooks. I left an entire slide in here about engineering notebooks because I really, really think that this is an underappreciated piece to VEX in general and it's definitely an underappreciated piece when we talk about Unified Robotics. But this idea that scholars are having thoughts in their head and they're going through the computational phase so that they can get to writing down how they're thinking about solving problems and then making sure that they are recording it. They're able to explicitly state, this is what I thought would happen. This is the hypothesis. This did work, this didn't work. This is what we had to go back and change. This idea of making sure that they're able to put their thoughts on paper is huge, especially for our neurodiverse kids who often struggle to communicate what they're thinking as they're going through a process. This levels the playing field for those kids.

Yeah, and if you think Eddie talked to you a lot about engineering notebooks, he talked to me about it for about 25 minutes over coffee this morning. So if you wanna join him tomorrow in the coffee shop, I'm sure he will be doing his second podcast on Unified. It's a beautiful thing.

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Engineering notebooks. In your bag, everybody got an engineering notebook. You should definitely explore that. It's pretty stinking awesome. They're the best thing ever.

So when we talk about VEX Robotics, you know, I know that we're at the VEX Educators conference and so I have to really shout out VEX, and beyond having to do anything or being at VEX, we explored lots of options when we talked about what we were going to do to teach STEAM in our schools. And VEX has this continuum that allows us to go pre-K to 12, in a way that is scalable, but then it is also accessible. The commitment and dedication to ensuring that all scholars across the board, regardless of ability, are able to do it, really means that VEX is the right thing for us and is the right thing for our scholars.

Emphasizing student agency, creativity, making sure that kids are their own problem solvers. Again, we're not trying to teach kids what the answers are. We're trying to teach kids what the questions are and that teaching kids what the questions are, is what VEX is all about. And then making sure that our scholars can see kids from all over the world, not just all over the US, not just from the wealthy, predominantly white district next door, but kids from other countries finding success in the same way that they're finding success, is absolutely huge and critical to us. And then just the fact that it's fun, it's an enjoyable thing.

Nate Willson for Christmas this year got a VEX IQ kit, yep. I paid for a VEX IQ kit so that he could have it, because he just loves it. And it's just something that our kids are asking to do at home, at school, anytime that they are, they're able to participate in something that they get choice around.

Short time interacting with VEX. I've been really impressed with how they've looked to include everyone of all abilities. And I just wanna shout out the team. Again, I know we're here, but even in my time spent over there in the Educators lounge, I just heard about how to include people, how to make adaptations to games and controllers and all those things. So I just applaud the effort that VEX is doing to include people in a meaningful way.

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So here's our website, roboticstogether.com. If you want to check it out, there's my email.

Whatever question I get, I'd be happy to forward it along to Jason or Eddie, so they can answer it. But we appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit more about Unified Robotics, and I think we have time for questions. Definitely. Thank you.

(people clapping)

I'll be happy to answer any of the emails that Andrew or Jason sends to me. That's usually the way that works. So we have a pretty big unified sports program in principal and county schools, and then we have a pretty robust robotics program. Do you all have a playbook that you would be willing to share? 'Cause I think that not starting from scratch, you know, and it is May, but it is kind of already late to be able to do that. So if, you know? That would be great if you had a playbook that you could share.

Yeah, yeah. Let's definitely connect. And this is one of the places where Tina and I and Andrew will connect with you for sure. We would love that. Did you say Prince William County? Yes, Virginia. Yeah, in Virginia. I used to live in DC, I love it. That's great.

What sports as she's walking over there for the next question? So part of our high school curriculum, and so mostly track, kickball. We do bowling. Nice. And we're trying to expand a little bit more. Great. This is my second year teaching and first year trying robotics. What do you personally feel is the most rewarding section of robotics for you?

The most rewarding section. I mean, I think that if you break down what VEX Robotics is, at least in our district, the thing that's most rewarding to me is teaching kids how to be problem solvers. So when we talk about rational thought, we talk about logic models, and we talk about just being able to solve problems in a unique and creative way. That's the biggest thing about robotics to me. Quite honestly, and I joke with Jason about this all the time, but if Nate Willson, who absolutely loves VEX Robotics, doesn't touch another robot again after he graduates Woodland Hills, but he is able to solve problems in the same way that he does every time he's in VEX Robotics class, then I'll be super happy. So that problem-solving ability is the big thing for me.

I'll chime in on that real quick. Just from the actual competitions we had. So one of the neat things about the Unified Robotics competitions was there was, from the schools that Dr. Willson mentioned, all the directors of special education there. Yeah. Who had obviously never been to a robotics competition before. So I got a chance to walk them around, very similar to, I'm going to walk all of you around during the pit walk and tour here momentarily. And they all, of course, thought that a robotics competition was going to be battle bots. They thought the robots were going to come on the field and they were going to destroy one another. It's going to be the last man standing wins essentially.

The thing that I really impressed upon them, which they really walked away with, was that robotics is a very unique sport in that it's almost impossible for the students to be embarrassed. So I coached high school football for 20 years, and you know, you can fumble the ball, the quarterback can get sacked. You can jump off sides and you have that ability to be embarrassed obviously. But a robotics competition, we obviously used IQ for this, you're incentivized to help one another. Right? So if Eddie's from Wood Hills and I might be from another school, from Hopewell, we're working together to try to achieve the highest score that we possibly can. So if his robot falls apart or if something happens, I'm incentivized to help him. So it really takes away a lot of that quote unquote embarrassment that you would have in a normal team sport.

And when, you know, Andrew talked about the bullying that a lot of these neurodivergent students have in our schools.

That's a really important aspect of this from a Unified Robotics competition. It allows these students to get together, it allows these students to collaborate, and allows these students to learn with one another in a really productive atmosphere for the reasons that I just mentioned.

So seeing that and then allowing these special education directors to see these kids participate in that and allow them to see it firsthand, that was really rewarding specifically to this program.

Yeah, one of the things I would say is the cool moment that I had at the competition was I literally whispered to Jason like, are these unified teams? Or is this just a mainstream competition? Because they were all working together. There was no obvious person that was struggling or behind or not being included. And that was just a really powerful, cool moment to be there and have to ask that question. 'Cause a lot of folks there had invisible disabilities and they were just, just right there competing alongside their peers. So it was really cool.

Dr. Willson, Mr. Fee, thank you very much again. Thank you so much.

VEX Robotics Educators Conference.