We got our new challenge on January 10. Since then, our whole team has had one focus – work together to build a robot and a team ready to compete. This past weekend, we packed up the team, the pit, the mentors, and many parents and headed to Duluth to see how well our work would come together.

Watching this robot perform is a thing of beauty. Our team decided to focus on picking up balls and shooting them – and this robot nails it. It picks up a whole huge hopper of balls, and when it shoots, there’s a whole arc of balls sliding right into the hopper. It’s fun to watch – and fun to watch our scores skyrocket as well.

But of course, the real success is the team members – the students and mentors who thought strategically, build carefully, showed up, and stayed late to build this machine of their dreams.

And they won! They played hard, played fair, networked with other teams across the competition – and came in first.

Now the team is headed to World Championship in April (after our second regional in Minneapolis). It’s expensive, but with a lot of help from our friends and family – we hope to compete hard, network fiercely, make new friends, and have a blast competing with teams from all over the country and the world.

Want to help? Check out our Houston and Beyond Paypal Campaign , to help us get to $50,000!