Team 1540 has had the honor of winning several of FIRST's awards. Check out our award history:

2008:

Xerox Creativity Award - Las Vegas Regional
The Xerox Creativity Award "Celebrates creativity in design, use of component, or strategy of play." The judges were impressed by our unorthodox hurdling strategy and our satellite dish grippers.

Website Award - Oregon Regional
From the FIRST website: The Website Award "Recognizes excellence in student-designed, built, and managed FIRST team websites." This site was built using Drupal. For more information, see our website page.

Engineering Inspiration Award - Oregon Regional
The Engineering Award "Celebrates outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering and engineers within a team’s school and community. This is the second-highest award a team can garner." For more information about what we did to earn this award, see our Outreach page. This award qualifies us for the Championship in Atlanta, Georgia for the second year.

Regional Champion - Oregon Regional
In our forth year, Team 1540 managed to pull our first regional victory, which qualifies us for the Championship in Atlanta. Our team remained the only undefeated team during the qualification matches, and lost only once in the finals. We would like to give a special thanks to our alliance partners Team 368 and Team 1280

2007:

Chairman's Award - Pacific Northwest Regional
From the FIRST Website: "FIRST’s most prestigious award, it honors the team judged to have created the best partnership effort among team participants, and to have best exemplified the true meaning of FIRST. The award helps keep the central focus of the FIRST Robotics Competition on the goal of inspiring greater levels of respect and honor for science and technology." This is the award that sent the Catlin Gabel Robotics Society to the championship and was the greatest shock to us. To check out what we did to earn this award, check out the Outreach page.

Regional Finalist - Pacific Northwest Regional
This award is the fruits of the hard work of the entire team on the robot itself. This award effectively symbolizes "Second Place" in the competition, making it to the final match and losing out only to the winning alliance. Thanks to our alliance last year at the Pacific Northwest Regional, teams 948 and 1778.

Motorola Quality Award - San Diego Regional
From the FIRST Website: The Motorola Quality Award "Celebrates machine robustness in concept and fabrication." The award which the fabrication department is most proud of, the Motorola Quality Award was given to Team 1540 for its dedication to the pricinciples of K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) throughout the design process. Our elegant and simple robot last year focused on scoring and scoring well, maintaining maneuverability without sacrificing weight.

1st Alliance - Pacific Northwest Regional
The top 8 teams at the end of the qualification matches choose alliances from all of the other teams to compete in the final matches. We were originally seeded 2nd (!), and accepted an invitation to join the first alliance from team 948.

2nd Alliance Captain - San Diego Regional
Once again, we seeded 2nd at the San Diego Regional, this time getting the awesome opportunity to captain an alliance.

Website Excellence Award - Pacific Northwest Regional
Last year's site incorporated javascript menus for the first time. The site also emphasized a simpler look through minimalizing the site's navigation and bringing attention to content.

2006:

Website Excellence Award - Pacific Northwest Regional
The Website Excellence Award is a web-based award given out to teams who's website scored well in the judging for Best Website, but were beaten out by another team. 2006's website was a completely re-written PHP code base on which the 2007 website would also be based (though it would have a completely different skin).

2005:

Rookie Inspiration Award - Pacific Northwest Regional
From the FIRST Website: The Rookie Inspiration Award "Celebrates a rookie team for outstanding effort as a FIRST team in community outreach and recruiting students to engineering." This award is the rough equivalent to the second-place Rookie All-Star award. Our team worked hard on outreach all year during our rookie season, hosting a kickoff, mentoring an FLL team and much more, and this award celebrates those efforts as well as having a solid robot.

Best Website Award - Pacific Northwest Regional
From the FIRST Website: The Best Website Award "Recognizes excellence in student-designed, built, and managed FIRST team websites." This was Team 1540's first FIRST award earned.  The completely hand-coded and content-driven 2005 website (still available online at http://www.team1540.org/2005 ) apparently impressed the judges with its oodles of content and focus on accessibility, and perhaps its bright-orange theme helped.

Best Website Award - FIRST World Championship
A complete shock to the entire team (the webmaster not even realizing the site was eligible), this award remains our first and only Championship event award (though its a six-way tie for smallest trophy). Check out the 2005 winning website.

7th Alliance Captain - Pacific Northwest Regional
The top 8 teams at the end of the qualification matches choose alliances from all of the other teams to compete in the final matches. Though we were originally seeded 12th, because the upper alliances chose teams from within the top 11, we ended up at the 7th captain seat, a very cool accomplishment for our first year.