Hey guys! It’s been a busy four weeks. Team 4201 has hit some major milestones including submitting multiple awards essays and all three challenge submissions. All of these will be linked below if you’re interested in checking them out 🙂

We’ve nominated Maya Waller (Business Director) and Winston Bird (Systems Director) to represent our team as Dean’s List Semifinalists. 4201 alumni and SpaceX mentor, Vince Ornelas, will also represent us as our Woodie Flowers Nominee. We’re excited to honor some of our amazing team members and mentors through these nominations. 

On top of these individual awards, our Business team has also crafted a powerful Chairman’s submission. This year, the team has taken on a new approach by focusing on failure and its importance to our team. As our mentors like to say, “It’s better to fail on a $5,000 robot than a $1 billion satellite.” We believe that the more willing we are to try and fail, the faster we will learn and reach our goals. Our three Chairman’s presenters are excited to share this message with the judges!

We just released our reveal video for our Game Design team submission, Set Sail! After CADing the field and game elements and 3D printing a 9:1 scale version, the Game Design team created this stop motion video to share with the judgesalong with the written submission, detailed rules, CAD, and game logo.

The Innovation Challenge team has also finished their Executive Summaries. They’re in the process of designing, testing, and reiterating their solution to reducing prolonged periods of sedentary behavior, and are excited to share their business pitch and presentation in the upcoming month.

Although we have made great progress with the design, assembly, and now programming of T-Rex, we’ve also realized that the robot isn’t on track to be ready for the Skills Challenge deadlines. We’re disappointed that we won’t be using our first swerve bot for this year’s competitions, but we will continue T-Rex’s development and will hopefully be able to bring an even more advanced swerve-drive bot to competitions next year. For now, we’ve shifted our focus to last year’s Infinite Recharge robot, Jango. Our controls team has been continuing Jango’s autonomous development in the background, and we feel confident that Jango will be able to complete all five challenges! Below are two videos of Jango completing the Barrel Racing Path and Bounce Path for the AutoNav Challenges. We’ll be using our time all the way up to April 8th to have the best possible video submissions for each challenge!

We’ll be sharing the results of each of the challenges’ presentations and videos in the next update, sometime after April 8th. As always, reach out to us at info@team4201.org with any questions, comments, or knock-knock jokes. Bye for now!