Our Team started the year out on a positive note by winning the first award for the season at the 2005 Kickoff Meeting. We won the Safety Animation Award and it was broadcast worldwide on the NASA channel. Our animation was played at all 30 Regional Events and the Championship Event. Team 342 will be featured in a FIRST Robotics documentary for SC. We were interviewed and videoed throughout the year by the SCETV team for a documentary that will be aired in March 2006.

Team 342 competed at the Florida Regional at the University of Central Florida , the Palmetto Regional in Columbia , SC , and the Championship Event in Atlanta this year. At the Florida Regional we won the Engineering Inspiration Award. This award is the second highest award that a team can win and it is typically given to the team that is the runner-up for the Chairman's Award at that regional event. Due to our team competing at the Palmetto Regional for the Chairman's Award, this is an honor for our team to win this prestigious award over the other Chairman Award entries at the Florida Regional. We also won the Visualization Award for our animation entry. We even had Governor Jeb Bush and Dr. Woody Flowers sign our robot!

At the Palmetto Regional in Columbia SC we won the Safety Award for creating a safe environment for our students and for our safety training plan. We were awarded the Best Sportsmanship Award for our team's on-going efforts to help a rookie team that didn't have the resources to build a robot but built one in two weeks anyway. Our students and mentors were able to lead the team to get the robot ready for competition and it ranked higher than our robot in the seed rankings at the end. We won the most prestigious award a team can earn, the Palmetto Regional Chairman's Award. This award is given to the team that best exemplifies the true meaning of FIRST.

At the Championship Event in Atlanta we ranked 23 in the Archimedes Division out of 85 robots. That was an accomplishment! The Archimedes division was filled with the toughest teams from past events. Our Design Team's Inventor Award entry was in the top 5 of their competition and it was used during the Autodesk training seminar to train other teams. Also, our Animation Team's Visualization Award entry was in the top 5 as well. It too was used to train other teams by the Autodesk trainers. We were in the top 2 for the Safety Award as well in the top 8 for the Chairman's Award.