PVIT Club offers students a hands-on experience to practice their classroom engineering education. Through a partnership of parents, students, and faculty, there are various projects and innovative ideas to be explored each week.

The establishment of PVIT, and the PVIT Club, were natural extensions of the success of the Palos Verdes High School Road Warriors Club in the two DARPA Grand Challenges. The acronym “DARPA” stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm of the US Department of Defense. In 2003, the Agency established the grand Challenge to inspire research into the creation of an autonomous robotic vehicle. The winning vehicle would navigate itself, autonomously or without any human intervention, through a lengthy and rigorous off-road course in the Nevada desert.

The Palos Verdes High School Road warriors Club distinguished itself for excellence by being the only high school in the nation to qualify not once, but twice, for the DARPA Grand Challenges, placing it at the starting line with such educational icons as Caltech, Virginia Tech, Carnegie-Mellon, and Stanford. Engaging in this project, students were able to learn hands-on from fundraising to welding to programming, how to prepare their Acura MDX vehicle for the Challenges. At both grand Challenges, the Palos Verdes High School Road warriors made it all the way to the Semi-finals, competing with colleges and universities throughout the country.

The PVIT Academic Program (different PVIT Club) formally began in September 2006 with the implementation of three engineering courses offered by Project Lead the Way . These three courses, Introduction to Engineering Design, Principles of Engineering, and Digital Electronics have been fully subscribed and are a great success. Added September 2007, Civil Engineering is the last course, thus completing the four years of engineering electives.