On January 10th, the Robotics teams 177 and 429 both celebrated kickoff at South Windsor High School, though one must ask what is the difference between the two teams?
429 is the Freshmen Robotics team, and it is comparable to how a lot of sports teams have Freshmen teams and Junior Varsity teams. On Team 429, freshmen will learn the basics and fundamentals of robotics, so at the end of the season, they can go on to join 177 either next season or later on in the current season.
“I had first joined the 176 team (a sister team of 177 years ago) and it got me really into STEM,” said Brandon Velasquez, a mentor for 429. “I’ve known many students who had come into robotics and didn’t want to do anything in STEM but came out wanting to go into it.”
For many people, Robotics is the first starting point for them wanting to get into STEM because they get real hands-on experiences of it.
“I’ve started mentoring after seeing 177 out in public, and I wanted to give back to the team who had inspired my passion,” Velasquez told The Prowl.
Several of the mentors for 429 and 177 have been on the Robotics team during their high school career in South Windsor or other towns. That is their biggest reason for starting 429, as it is a way to get freshmen into robotics without it being too overwhelming with everything coming at them all at once.
A lot of the freshmen on 429 started back in September and October when the preseason for Robotics started. During the preseason, they would do STEM projects, presentations, design challenges, and more activities to prepare them for the upcoming start of the season on January 10, 2026.
Although 429 are a lot of freshmen’s experiences with Robotics, many of the freshmen joined 429 for the reason of continuing robotics in high school. A good number of people on Team 429 competed in the middle school robotics competition against each other. An example of this is Musa Rana, a freshman in 429.
“Building a robot is pretty cool. I like helping with the team building the robot, it’s fun. I like building stuff for robotics,” Rana said.
After many months of these important preseason activities, the 2026 robotics season kicked off on January 10th. On this day, many Team 429 members of the robotics team attended and participated in activities to familiarize themselves with this year’s game. Their first project was watching a Robotics team in the Robotics competition, “Robot in 3 days,” and making a slideshow on it.
After doing the presentation, many of the students started working on the smaller sub teams of 429, those being mechanical, design, programming, and marketing. Many of the programming students learned how to start coding a robot. This is very important for the first twenty seconds of a robotics game where the robot can only be controlled by code and no human input. The mechanical and design students learned about designing and the functions of a robot. They will eventually start learning the basics of tool use like drills and vacuums to help take apart the robot from last year.
This is just the start of the season for Teams 429 and 177. The freshmen look forward to a bright season of learning and creativity, and Team 177 looks forward to a bright season full of good competitions.
