X Academy

X Academy offers STEAM enrichment programs that include the Santa Cruz Math Circle, Julia Robinson Math Festival, other math festivals, math competitions, and a robotics program with robotics clubs. Students have participated in an Underwater Robotics Competition and the MATE ROV World Championships through X Academy.

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, X Academy has organized 99 weekly math sessions for 441 students from 62 different schools in Santa Cruz and Monterey County. Thirty-eight percent of these students were female and one-third were from traditionally underrepresented communities of color. X Academy has hosted six Julia Robinson Math Festivals and provides Santa Cruz County students with STEM programs that are readily available to Silicon Valley students. The Santa Cruz County Office of Education entered into a partnership with X Academy to expand to Watsonville, including 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, who is a community organizer and 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. Leadership also includes Brianna Donaldson, Director of Special Projects at the American Institute of Mathematics, who holds a PhD from Indiana University; Jennifer Gill, a GATE Intervention Teacher at Watsonville School of the Arts and Math Circle teacher; Tim Madsen, a parent leader at Westlake, Mission Hill, and Pacific Collegiate School and a robotics club mentor with a BA in Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz; and Tim Sylvester, founder of X Academy, a software engineer at Joby Aviation and CTE robotics teacher at Sequoia High School, who previously worked at Netflix, Facebook, Google, Cisco, and TGV and holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Iowa State University.

In robotics, a team prepared by X Academy placed 7th in the world competition telepresence division of the Underwater Robotics Competition in 2021. In 2022, the robotics team placed 3rd in the Monterey Bay Regional competition. The team won 2nd place in 2023, qualifying them to compete in the World Championship, where they placed 5th out of 32 teams from around the world. A county-wide team went on to win 3rd place at the MATE ROV World Championships in June 2024. ©2014–2025 X Academy.

Last updated June 10, 2026.