No robotics team from Wisconsin — at any age level — has ever achieved what a group of Rice Lake sixth-graders accomplished this spring.
Members of the Natural Disaster robotics team from the Spartan Robotics Club at St. Joseph School in Rice Lake — Noah Hafstad, Zach Haughian, Eli Helgeson and Max Delf — earned the prestigious VEX IQ Elementary Excellence Award at the 2026 VEX Robotics World Championship held in April in St. Louis, Missouri, officially recognizing them as the top elementary VEX IQ robotics team in the world this season.
The accomplishment is historic not only for Rice Lake, but for the entire state of Wisconsin. No Wisconsin VEX robotics team at any level has ever previously won an Excellence Award at the VEX Robotics World Championship.
The accomplishment is difficult to overstate. This year, tens of thousands of elementary VEX IQ teams from more than 60 countries competed worldwide throughout the season, all hoping to advance through local, state, national, and international qualifying events. Only 417 elementary teams ultimately earned the opportunity to compete at the VEX IQ World Championship event in St. Louis.
Simply qualifying for the VEX Robotics World Championship at any level places a team among approximately the top 1% of robotics teams in the world.
The Excellence Award is considered the highest honor presented at the tournament and recognizes the team that demonstrates overall excellence in robot design, programming, driving skills, teamwork, engineering documentation, interviews, and professionalism throughout the competition.
In many ways, the achievement is comparable to a local youth baseball team winning the Little League World Series.
This season, teams competed in a game called Mix and Match, which required students to design, build and program robots capable of stacking colored pins and beams in multiple scoring configurations while working cooperatively with alliance partners. Success in the game required strong engineering, strategic thinking, autonomous programming and precise driver control.
Natural Disaster qualified for Worlds after winning the Wisconsin State Championship in March. They then traveled to St. Louis to compete against teams from countries including China, Vietnam, South Korea and Mexico.
Despite already having a state championship robot, the students themselves made the decision after state to significantly redesign and rebuild their machine in hopes of becoming more competitive at the World Championship level.
The process required the students to rethink strategy, redesign mechanisms, rewrite code and spend countless hours testing improvements. Even though their original robot had already won Wisconsin State, the team knew additional improvements would be necessary to compete against the best teams in the world.
Natural Disaster finished eighth in the world in the Teamwork Challenge while also placing in the top 10% worldwide in both the Driver Skills and Autonomous Coding Skills competitions. Combined with an outstanding judged interview and engineering notebook, the performance earned them the Excellence Award during the tournament’s closing ceremony.
Jeremy “Pete” Peterson serves as head coach of both the Spartan Robotics and Warrior Robotics programs in Rice Lake. He is assisted in the Spartan Robotics program by parent volunteer coaches Jonathon Delf, Susan Wojtkiewicz, and Jordan Hafstad, all of whom played a major role in mentoring and supporting the team throughout the season.
Peterson said the accomplishment reflects not only the hard work of the students, but also the support system surrounding them.
“It takes a community to help such kids be successful and the parent mentors that work with Spartan Robotics teams are the best,” Peterson said. “I have known this for years, but now the whole world does.”
Coach Jonathon Delf described the moment of hearing the team announced as unforgettable.
“I was just in shock with the news,” Delf said. “It was an unbelievable recognition for all the hard work our team had put in. For a tournament with teams from all over the world competing, it was pretty special for the award to be awarded to a team from a small Midwestern town.”
Parent mentor Susan Wojtkiewicz, an engineer by profession, said watching the students develop throughout the season was especially meaningful.
“As an engineer, it’s an honor to work with the next generation of STEM as they prepare to shape our future,” Wojtkiewicz said. “It was truly a team effort as the boys learned to strategize the game, build the robot, develop the autonomous code, and drive the robot.”
Team member Eli Helgeson said the award announcement came as a complete surprise.
“It was very exciting and surprising to be called up on the stage to receive the Excellence Award,” Helgeson said. “There were teams from all over the world that did better than us in other parts of the tournament, and they chose us. Our hard work paid off.”
Helgeson also said some of his favorite memories came from experiencing the worldwide atmosphere of the event.
“In the opening ceremony, the Parade of Nations took place and we got to see all of the countries that participated in Worlds,” he said. “The closing ceremony was especially fun because we got to see what the next VEX IQ game will be.”
Max Delf said the team’s success was especially rewarding after rebuilding the robot so close to the competition.
“I was shocked, especially since we rebuilt our robot just three weeks prior,” Delf said. “But I was really proud of our team.”
Even after reaching the top of the robotics world, the students are already thinking ahead to next season. Team member Zach Haughian said the unveiling of the new VEX IQ game, Level Up, immediately sparked new ideas.
“As unbelievable as winning Worlds was this year, I’m already thinking about the type of robot to build for next year’s competition game called Level Up,” Haughian said.
Ingenuity
The success at Worlds extended beyond the elementary division this year. Rice Lake was also represented in the high school VEX V5 division by team Ingenuity, made up of Rice Lake High School students Owen Roethel, Brandon Mincoff and Wyatt Mincoff.
Ingenuity became the first high school robotics team from Rice Lake to ever qualify for the VEX V5 World Championship. The team earned its spot after finishing with one of the top overall skills rankings at the Wisconsin State Tournament.
At the high school level, students competed in a game called Push Back, which required robots to collect apple-shaped scoring elements and place them into a variety of horizontal scoring chutes while also strategically interacting with other game elements across the field. The game demanded fast robot mechanisms, advanced autonomous programming, and highly coordinated driver control.
Competing against some of the best high school robotics teams in the world, the students performed well during their first World Championship appearance, finishing near the middle of the pack within their division — a strong accomplishment for a first-year Worlds team.
Roethel said one of the most memorable parts of the event was seeing students from around the world united by engineering and technology.
“It was nice to see the robotics community come together from so many different countries,” Roethel said. “Although we were competing against these teams now, in the future we know we might be working with these same individuals to solve the world’s most pressing problems.”
Peterson said working with students across all levels of competitive robotics has been one of the most rewarding experiences of his teaching career.
“I’m incredibly proud to work with such great kids at all levels of competitive VEX Robotics,” Peterson said. “I know firsthand the countless hours that students, mentors, and families put into this activity. But I truly believe it is worthwhile because, in this sport, every kid has a chance to go pro. These students are building skills in engineering, programming, teamwork, communication, and problem solving that can directly shape their futures and ultimately help solve real-world problems.”
The accomplishments of both Natural Disaster and Ingenuity mark another major milestone for Rice Lake area robotics programs. The St. Joseph robotics program completed its fourth year this spring, while the Warrior Robotics high school program continues to grow into a highly competitive force in Wisconsin robotics.
Together, the teams demonstrated that students from a small northern Wisconsin community can compete — and succeed — on the world stage.
The teams and coaches also expressed gratitude to the many businesses, organizations, and community members who financially supported the students on their journey to the World Championship. Sponsors included McCain Foods, Thomas Precision, Kitchen Kleen Potatoes, Henry Repeating Arms, Rice Lake Weighing Systems, LOOS Automation, Link Ford of Rice Lake, the Education Foundation of Rice Lake, the Rice Lake Celebrity Classic, 3M, and countless individual supporters throughout the Rice Lake community.
Now, after earning the highest award in the world’s largest youth robotics competition and sending its first-ever high school team to the VEX V5 World Championship, Rice Lake robotics has shown not only Wisconsin, but the entire world, that this small community is developing into one of the strongest youth robotics programs anywhere.
