Building bridges
USC robotics team helping youth with limited mobility
A group of Upper St. Clair High School students are not only building, designing and programming robots for competitions, they’re using their robotic knowledge and experience to help kids facing limited mobility.
Team TeraBridges, in existence since 2020, is composed of 15 Upper St. Clair High School students. They are a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics team involved in competitions in which they design, build and program robots for game challenges. FTC is a component of FIRST, the world’s leading robotics community.
Students are also active in community outreach, hosting events and initiatives that inspire future innovators and expand access to STEM.
Junior Josh Beitler is the captain of a team that has seen considerable success, earning a spot in the FIRST World Championships in April. Out of 8,800 FTC teams competing globally, only 256 qualified for the World Championships. TeraBridges placed eighth out of 64 teams in its division.
“I really love robotics,” Beitler said recently at the team’s BotCave robotics facility in Lawrence.
At a recent qualifying event at Manheim Township High School in Lancaster, the team received the Inspire Award and earned a spot in the state FTC competition in March 2026. The Inspire Award is the highest award in FTC competitions, honoring teams that demonstrate well-rounded achievement in engineering, teamwork and community engagement.
Beitler’s parents, Sarah and Rick, are coaches. Sarah Beitler said the team members are receiving a foundation for the future with this experience.
“The kids are learning engineering, programming and teamwork skills to build robots, to solve the problems of the yearly game,” she said. “But there’s also lots of community aspects to it. Our team has really started to focus on that a lot more. We made it to the world championship in Houston. We’re really proud of that, but we’re also proud of the community aspect of it,”
Among the community activities is helping and establishing a relationship with Jackson Beck, a fourth-grader with disabilities at Baker Elementary School in the Upper St. Clair School District.
They watched a video of Beck when he was in third grade using a quad stick, a device guided by a person’s mouth to play video games.
“We told him the high schoolers wanted to learn something from him, which he thought was cool,” Sarah Beitler said. “He taught us a lot. After meeting with Jackson, we started to look more into assisted technologies.”
Sophomore Ashwin Vasudevan, the team’s outreach leader, recalled playing video games with Beck and the impact it had on the team.
“That’s what really spiraled into us having a new passion, all of these assisted technologies that we’re now pursuing,” he said. “It really all started from that video we all saw of Jackson and it snowballed into all of these different events. The main purpose of robotics is to help people and we as a team try to remember that. It’s really amazing the impact that we’re having.”
Sophomore Felix Chen, the team’s CAD (Computer Aided Design) and build leader, was able to develop an adaptive plow for Beck’s wheelchair to enable him to play soccer.
“It fits perfectly on his wheelchair and keeps it secure,” Chen said. “That was really cool because before that I was using all of these skills to create a robot. Now, I was able to affect somebody’s life in this way. That was really, really cool.”
They also were involved with physical and occupational therapy students at Chatham University in the Go Baby Go program, which creates adaptive equipment, such as a ride-on car, for children with disabilities.
“If we move the accelerator to a different part of the car, then it’s easier for them to move it forward,” said junior Rohan Inampudi, systems leader. “When we gave the cars to these children and their families, one of the mothers broke down in tears …. The kids themselves were really excited. They couldn’t wait to get in the cars and start driving.”
Team members have reached out to close to 20 industry professionals to learn more about robotics and receive guidance in proceeding with their mission in assistive technology.
They also recently donated toys (bubble blowers) with adaptive switches to Child’s Way and are spearheading an advocacy effort with state representatives to obtain grant fund to promote robotics in under-resourced school districts and participated in the second annual Early Childhood Disability Inclusion Conference in November at Temple Emmanuel in Mt. Lebanon.
“Having a FIRST Tech Challenge team is like a little business,” Sarah Beitler said. “All of these kids want to go into something robotics, but they’re also learning great skills like teamwork, communications and public speaking. Those are things that not all engineers are really great at, so I think all of these kids are going to be able to go into leadership within whatever profession they go into because of these additional skills they can manifest and show.”
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