Mentors are the north star for our team, providing guidance and direction as we chart new futures. They’re often experts within their professional fields and are the reason we have such successful competition seasons. They teach students how to properly utilize many business and engineering-based skills — from Excel, programming, and working with businesses to CAD, soldering, fabrication and machining, and even cutting wood, and everything in between. Most important of all these skills that the mentors teach us are how to work together in project teams, such as how our subteams like frameworks, functions, and controls have to work together or else the robot will either fall apart or not move. Our ability to work together is what changes the StormBots from a bunch of random teenagers making a hunk of metal move to a well-oiled team that can turn a box of parts into a well designed and functioning 125 pounds of metal, plastic and wire that can move, tilt, lift and pivot while completing challenges — in other words, our mentors provide us an with focus and unite us as a team.