Thursday, September 1, 2011

Feelin' More Than Just Ducky


Our team’s anticipation was intense as we waited for the results of the MoonBots 2.0 Google Lunar X Prize LEGO MINDSTORMS Challenge.  There were so many extremely talented teams around the world and so many amazing entries.  It was a tough competition.  Thus, we are so grateful, honored and thrilled to have been awarded second place in the MoonBots 2.0 competition.  By winning this prize, we will be able to build, program and compete with robots at the next level.   
We want to congratulate the winning teams, LegoAces and Lunar Lords, along with all the other participating teams.  We learned a lot from each other.
We thank all those involved in the MoonBots competition.  Specifically, we would like to thank MoonBots Google Lunar X Prize LEGO MINDSTORMS for organizing the competition, Team Indus for their mentoring, guidance and belief in us, Michael Doornbus of evadot.com for his inspiration, research and podcast, Fox 9 News and Woodbury Bulletin for their media coverage of Team Just Ducky and Eva Resa Publishing for their guidance and encouragement with our book.
Personally, we appreciate the knowledge we have gained through our work during the this competition.  It has been an extremely extraordinary experience for us all.  We learned about space exploration from some of the top innovators in the world and applied our science and math skills to program and design our robot.  The outreach project helped us to reach out to the global community.  We were also able to improve our presentation skills by producing videos, interviewing with the media, writing a book, publishing blogs, creating our website, and utilizing social media such as Twitter and Facebook.
As a team we learned a lot about leadership skills, team work, gracious professionalism, the importance of time management, sportsmanship and entrepreneurship.  All this is key to working in a global, virtual environment. This has been an invaluable experience.   
This has been a great journey for us all.  We are excited to be part of history as private industries have now taken over space exploration to the moon.  We are honored to be invited to Team Indus’s launch to the moon in 2014.  We support them and look forward to their success.