Rover Prototype "Dune"

Not every object should leave the team that made it. This rover still lives in a classroom cupboard and still gets rebuilt each season by younger students, which is exactly what should happen to it.

Instead of collecting the model, we collected the record: photographs of every iteration, the team's sketches, and their explanation of why the sensor mast ended up at the back.

The team moved the sensor from the front to the rear of the rover after their first version kept knocking the mast into field walls. Their notebook shows three alternatives sketched in one session, and the reason they picked the last one: it was the only version that a six-year-old could rebuild without help.

That reasoning — design for the next person's hands — is the part of FIRST that a photograph of a finished robot never captures.