X Academy

X Academy offers activities that include the Santa Cruz Math Circle, Julia Robinson Math Festival, other math festivals and math competitions, as well as a Robotics Program and Robotics Clubs. Students at X Academy have the chance to participate in an Underwater Robotics Competition, including teams that have competed at the MATE ROV World Championships. The program includes county-wide robotics teams that bring together students and mentors from multiple schools.

• Ages: 8–18 years old

The X Academy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit formed in 2014 to provide STEAM enrichment programs to kids in the Santa Cruz County region. Since launching the Santa Cruz Math Circle in 2014, it has organized 99 weekly math sessions for 441 students from 62 different schools in Santa Cruz and Monterey County, with thirty-eight percent of students female and one-third from traditionally underrepresented communities of color. It has hosted six Julia Robinson Math Festivals. The Santa Cruz County Office of Education entered into a partnership with X Academy to expand to Watsonville to include 52 students from 15 schools across the county with 15 mentors. X Academy receives funding from the Santa Cruz County Office of Education, the Monterey Peninsula Foundation, the Sylvester-Meister Foundation, and individual donations from parents, friends, and family.

The leadership team includes co-founder Barbara Meister, workforce development consultant with an MA in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government and a BA from the University of Nebraska; Brianna Donaldson, Director of Special Projects at the American Institute of Mathematics with a PhD from Indiana University; Jennifer Gill, a GATE Intervention Teacher at Watsonville School of the Arts and Math Circle Teacher; Tim Madsen, parent leader and Robotics Club mentor with a BA in Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz; and Tim Sylvester, founder of X Academy and software engineer at Joby Aviation, a CTE robotics teacher at Sequoia High School, and former engineer at Netflix, Facebook, Google, Cisco, and TGV with a BS in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University.

In 2021, a team prepared by X Academy placed 7th in the Underwater Robotics Competition World Competition, telepresence division. In 2022, the robotics team placed 3rd in the Monterey Bay Regional competition. In 2023, the team won 2nd place, qualifying them to compete in the World Championship where they placed 5th out of 32 teams from around the world. A county-wide team won 3rd place at the MATE ROV World Championships in June 2024.

Last updated March 11, 2026.