Where young people learn by building.
Definity helps young people learn by taking on engineering challenges. Students build, test, work through failures, and learn what they need along the way. We run high school programs in Los Angeles and organize the Lander Challenge, a global competition for university teams building self-landing rockets.
To help young people discover their life's work and build the skills to pursue it meaningfully.
Learn through the work.
You don’t need to know everything before you begin. You do need to take responsibility for learning it. Start building, find out what you don’t understand, and use resources to work through it. Test your design, investigate what failed, and try again.
In our high school programs, engineers and mentors ask questions, challenge your assumptions, and help you work out the next step. They expect you to do the research, make decisions, and understand your work.
Join a team.
High school students build with us after school in Hawthorne. University teams can enter the Lander Challenge. Over the summer, high school students build robots in Los Angeles.
Take on the challenge.
Your team has an engineering goal to work toward. Develop your design, build it, and test what happens. When it doesn’t work, investigate the problem and make the next attempt better.
Learn to keep going.
Build the habit of finding useful information, asking questions, and working through unfamiliar problems. Taking responsibility for different parts of a project also helps you discover what you enjoy.
Built by student teams
Lander Challenge teams have designed, built, and test-fired their own liquid rocket engines. Watch some of that work below.
Our programs
Our work starts with engineering. Here’s what that looks like today.
Lander Challenge
Collegiate teams design, build, and fly self-landing rockets: liquid engines, thrust vector control, and hotfire tests in the desert. $390K in prizes across five milestones.
→ High schoolAfter-School Engineering
Students in grades 9–12 work in teams to build rockets and formula-style race cars. The program runs year-round in Hawthorne, California.
→ High schoolSummer Program
Six weeks in Los Angeles: high school students build and program off-road robots that drive themselves, then race them. Join the interest list for next summer.
→ GrantsAerospace Development Grants
Funding for student rocketry teams to buy materials, build hardware, and test their work, supported by the Musk Foundation. The completed round funded 50 teams; applications are closed.
→Follow along
We just partnered with the Musk Foundation to give out $175k in grants to advance the frontier of collegiate rocketry.
This is in addition to the $390k we’re already giving out to collegiate teams building propulsive self-landing rockets.
When we first started, people laughed
The team successfully hotfired a 550 lbf liquid engine for 14s, and gimbaled 13 degrees in all directions. @seb_berkeley is all about an incredibly ambitious goal to launch a liquid rocket into space, and Lander Challenge was created to support audacious students just like this.
Get involved with Definity.
Join as a student, work with us as a mentor, or help fund the programs. Contact us if you have questions about taking part.