Monster Gator had a wonderful start to the week with the sponsor site visit on Monday. Our team, along with our coach Dr. Latorre, had the chance to visit Feld Entertainment’s headquarters in Palmetto, Florida, where we met our liaison and project executive, learned about the company’s history, and got a tour of the entire facility. It was a surreal experience to witness all the behind-the-scenes work and efforts that go into bringing a show to life. We got to see and analyze the Monster Truck that would be at the core of our project. We had the opportunity to speak to a few of the staff members that are involved with our project as well as the monster truck in general to get better acquainted with the truck mechanisms. Having a look at the monster truck answered a lot of our questions, giving us a clearer vision for our future plan, but also left us coming up with exciting new and innovative ideas. We took the components from Phase 1 of the project with us so that we could have a closer look at them and reuse some of them to implement an improved solution. Apart from the trip, the car rides were also filled with brainstorming, detailed analysis of ideas, and fun team bonding interactions.

On Tuesday, we had a virtual meeting for the class because of Hurricane Ian, and the college was closed from Wednesday to Friday for the same reason. We decided to take a break for the rest of the week and instead focus on everyone’s safety first. We made sure that we would not fall behind the schedule by much since we had accomplished most of our primary objectives for the week from the site visit.