Patent Pending (Team)

Overview
Team #14384 Patent Pending is an FTC team from Jacksonville, Florida. Founded in 2018, it is the first FTC team at The Bolles School. The team's current members are: Aman, Charlie, PK, and Zekun.

2018-19 Season
The Bolles School's FTC program was started by two members of Patent Pending's sister team, the Voyagers. Students entering the FTC program were divided into two teams roughly equal in size and skill. All students entering Patent Pending had at least some robotics experience through either the school's FLL team or other FTC teams. Meetings were held twice a week to work on the robot. Throughout the season, members placed an emphasis on simplicity in robot design and a strong focus on outreach and media as well as assembly and programming.

Members
Patent Pending contained a group of members from a diverse range of grade levels, backgrounds, and experience levels, including two Freshmen (Aman and PK), one Sophomore (Zekun), one Junior (Charlie), and one Senior (Spencer). Co-leaders during the 2018-19 season were Aman and Charlie, who worked on robot assembly and outreach. Programming lead Zekun created the robot's code, and Media leads PK and Spencer were in charge of the team's YouTube account and the engineering notebook.

Season Performance
The team performed extremely well in the 2018-19 season, especially for a rookie team. Although rankings were low in the first several meets, a major comeback was made leading up to the league championships, where Patent Pending was a part of the winning alliance and was able to advance to the Florida FTC State Tournament. At States, the team finished in 16th place out of 48 total groups, and learned valuable information and strategies to help them go further in the following seasons.

2019-20 Season
In order to better prepare themselves for their second year in FTC, members began preparing several weeks after completing the 2018-19 season. The team decided to start working on the notebook, assembly, and media months before the beginning of the season. The group met twice a week during the end of the school year and over summer break to hold workshops on robot construction, programming, etc. so that each member would be well-rounded and be able to help with anything.

Members
With Patent Pending's only senior member Spencer going off to college, the rest of the team's original lineup remained for the 2019-20 season. Two new members from the upper school joined (Avneesh, Yash), along with _ members from the middle school campus: (_, _, etc)