Coming to us from Groveland, Florida is the joyfully gelatinous VEX Robotics Competition team 2733J Jelly! Team Jelly shared their interesting story with us.
Team Jelly was started in the fall of 2020 in honor of Mattias grandpa’ George who was a man with visions and an amazing engineering mind. Mattias has loved VEX since he was introduced to the program in 4th grade. He has been on a few different IQ teams and competed in both Florida and Arizona depending on where we lived.
In 2020, his High School was only doing virtual robotics meets and not building a new robot. Mattias really enjoys the design and engineering process and in order to support him we helped him start Team Jelly 2733J. Late in the 2020 season he was joined by Derek who is an awesome programmer, Keira who likes to program and is the teams social media specialist, and Mollie who will be scouting and making the notebook better in the upcoming seasons. For the season of 2021/22 they were joined by Adam who is a freshman at a school with no VEX or FIRST program.
Team Jelly’s color was red in 20/21, because Mattias likes strawberry Jelly. In 21/22 he was outvoted by the rest of the team who like Grape Jelly so the color changed to Purple.
Grandpa’ George passed away in February of 2020 at the age of 93, after a long and eventful life. He had
a brilliant mind and for years he fine tuned and manufactured a product called Hydrocap which was developed in 1948 by Dr. Palmer H. Craig, in the Physics Department at the University of Miami for the U.S. Navy.
Hydrocap has been used by individuals, institutions, businesses and government agencies worldwide in thousands of applications, from solar powered systems and electric vehicles to submarines. He also created a scuba scooter used by the US Navy as well as worked on an underwater house. And he was an avid offshore racer. He briefly stayed with us in 2019 and was fascinated by Mattias’ 3D printer and both he and his sisters’ VEX IQ robots. And grandpa’ loved jelly.
You can meet Team Jelly during the VEX competition day at ROBOTICON, on October 3!